Verification has been decoupled from process. Anyone can perform it. A thread, a meme, a confident voice on a podcast, all can simulate the work of verification without doing it. What looks like truth-seeking is often just performance.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
I hope so, too, but it assumes a critical mass of people who care enough about what's true/real and what's not. I always assumed without really considering it that people cared about that, but the last dozen years have to make us at least question it.
Deliberation used to happen on more of a schedule. There were news cycles, debates, hearings, editorial deadlines. The pace created space, however flawed, for argument, response, and reflection. Now it all happens instantly, with no separation between thought and reaction.
And in that environment, engagement becomes validation. If a claim fits your worldview, and your community endorses it, that becomes your truth. There’s no structure to slow things down, no filter to force second thoughts.
A good non political example of that is the Anti-AI bias on Bsky. AI is dangerous, but so are computers. It's concerning that so many refuse to use AI instead of trying to make it better.
Wasn't that also true for most people even before the recent platform-enabled shift ? I mean most people were not involved in the debates but just took for granted what their figures of authority (journalists, scientists, judges, politicians) claimed after they debated.
The difference here would then be that there are more figures of authority (anyone can claim to be one) and that they don't follow a structured process. So critical thinking was relevant yesterday just like today, but can it really replace verification ?
In addition to these points, all claims of authority look alike nowadays. There used to be an easily discernable difference between professionally run sources and amateur ones, with professional ones trying for dependability so as not lose the trust of their audience.
Nowadays, even the most educated and honest source looks the same as everyone else. They tweet, they post tiktoks, they put out podcasts of them in Zoom chats. They have the same tone as disinformation makers (bcz the disinformation makers ape them).
This isn’t just about bad information. It’s about the disappearance of epistemic structure, the structures we used to build our understanding of the world. When verification and deliberation both become flattened, frictionless, and identity-driven, accountability has nowhere to land.
What an idiotic self-satisfied meaningless statement. For clarity of language you might benefit from reading Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. A person who did actually fight for Democracy.
That’s why critical thinking education isn’t optional, it’s foundational. If verification now happens at the level of the individual, then the individual needs the tools institutions once provided, rigour, scepticism, and the ability to challenge their own assumptions.
Even with critical thinking education I am not optimistic in an individual’s ability to do the work once done by a team of professionals. It’s very difficult to do a day job, raise kids, etc, and then after all that, scroll through a feed of misinformation and not absorb it as at least partly true.
The ‘16 billion logins have leaked’ stories from various news outlets only reinforces this for me. It’s presented in some articles as indicating a new attack and that everyone should change their passwords, but that doesn’t seem to be backed up by credible evidence. Tough to look at it critically,
But that collapse creates a choice. Either we rebuild more inclusive, democratic structures for verification, deliberation and accountability functions, or the wealthiest and most powerful will do it for us, in their own image.
This won’t fix itself. Rebuilding an information environment that serves democracy, not just markets or ideologies, requires effort across education, media, civil society, and policy. It’s a societal task, not just a technical one.
I think among its proponents, there's a temptation to say with the right prompt, the right tools, and the right information, a proper Verification AI might be able to outperform even a talented human in real time. At least for the moment this is FALSE. The AI are far too eager to confirm biases.
Comments
In a world of endless and instant fake AI video and audio, someone has to verify what's real and what not.
But there's been a lot of distrust in institutions before the AI (LLMs reaaly) bubble hit.
Anti-vaxxers probs the best example.
Anyway, it's a very nice thread and the VDA frameworks is very useful, thanks.