Thinking back for no particular reason to the US controversy among leftists about The Correspondent (one of the very few journalistic outlets in NL that actually did in-depth reporting on fascism and racism over the past decade), and how the discourse was completely littered with verifiably false claims about what had happened.
@joepie91 discourse being littered with inaccuracies? Surely not!
@Scmbradley I mean, there's "inaccuracies" and then there's "inaccuracies". In this case there were a few highly specific claims that kept popping up with remarkable fidelity but any attempt to obtain evidence consistently ran into a wall.
It felt an awful lot like deliberate disinformation, rather than genuine confusion or miscommunication.
@joepie91 oh right, I don't know the details of this case. Was just goofing about how full of nonsense every internet discussion inevitably gets.
@Scmbradley Honestly I'm not convinced that it's so inevitable. There seem to be a few specific conditions that causes this to happen (not all deliberate), and there are also plenty of cases and circumstances where it goes fine but those don't tend to stick in people's minds.
I think the view that "internet discussions will inevitably turn bad" is kind of dangerous, actually, because it's a demotivator for improving our collective social spaces, essentially the equivalent of political nihilism.
@joepie91 I definitely think it's possible to to have polite fact-based conversations online. But I suspect that when a discussion kind of breaks out into the zeitgeist and becomes Discourse, it almost inevitably starts going bad. (and there are good explanations as to why that happens: lack of context, more voices involved, etc etc).
I agree that it's a dangerous view to have, that's a good point.