Right on. I'm sure there's a sense in which you're right; I'm not a historian, but history is full of counterexamples so we both have a partial picture probably. All I can say for sure is that as a person living in 2025, our media is problematic in a unique way. The amount of social media news consumed is at an all-time high, and social media is on average less accurate about facts than professional news. What's ironic is that the internet and related communication tech means there really is a huge potential for democratic, productive media; more than any other time in history. I feel like the increase in information people get means that they understand, at least, that they should be critical of news media, and channeling that criticism into a forum of news meta analysis would be dope.
About your historic points specifically, I read that at some point there were local, labor union and citizen sponsored papers in many places in the US and Britain that were not corporate owned, and their customers were the readers and not advertisers; that's a fundamental difference from most mass media. I'm no expert, my source for this is the intro to Herman/Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, if memory serves.
1- Thanks so much for these resources, interesting!!
- Im not saying my only goal is to combat misinformation, but that logical discourse combats misinformation (as well as hegemonic propaganda) as a matter of course.
Hello :)
I'm here fundamentally to get some constructive criticism on how to improve internet discourse. This came about when I was writing a journalistic piece on the recent congressional subcommittee, and trying to get to the bottom of the lab-leak evidence as part of the research.
In short, I'm floating the idea of a crowd-sourced and written, peer-reviewed medium on subjects like conspiracy theories (AKA: revisionist history that's still political). With a solid framework, gatekeeping could be avoided and real people (not just professional intellectuals) could participate. Thus helping remove the biases (real and imaginary) that exist in typical journalistic and corporate information, and give people a better chance to engage logically and synthesize arguments themselves. I don't see many tools for people to forward ideas based on the merit of logic in a space that is dominated by sensationalism, at best. Yet discourse about these topics more than anything else fundamentally combats propaganda and misinformation. There's also the benefit of having a robust literature that could then be rapidly queried using an AI analogous to scispace, something that political and activist information has fallen behind on.
We've had peer-reviewed journals for science since the 18th century and it revolutionized knowledge availability. We need a human rights revolution now, and there should be a way to separate the alchemists from the scientists here too.
Since my idea is radically rationalist, I figured I'll get feedback instead of my usual browsing here. Look for my essay soon. Till then, have ya'll seen anything like this in practice, even historically? Insights from the academic alt-publishing world? If there's other essays along similar lines, or discussing how internet discourse works in general please send it my way.
Sam Garcia, California
It was announced just yesterday that meta is planning to incorporate community notes as well using open source X algorithms. Ostensibly it could become the state-of-the-art bandaid solution.
In my opinion, community notes systems are a good step, but they don't give much space for real deliberation around news.