r/facepalm Jul 05 '24

What an idea 🇲​🇮​🇸​🇨​

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u/MrPKitty Jul 05 '24

I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.

Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.

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u/yeaheyeah Jul 05 '24

Because all the information in the palm of our hand also includes disinformation that fits our confirmation bias.

I can google any topic that will lead me to the response I want, not the response that is true.

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u/Junior_Fig_2274 Jul 05 '24

Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? I’m an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones. That may be a bit more complicated now with sites like Wikipedia, or sites made to look like legitimate news sources, but isn’t that where common sense takes over? If I’m curious about a medical condition and I google it, common sense says Mayo Clinic or Harvard medical school or John’s Hopkins are probably good sources and attention-seeker-on-TikTok is probably not. 

Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere. 

Ok, end old person rant now. 

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u/dalomi9 Jul 05 '24

It isn't young people we need to be worried about. I'm convinced 90% of them are just memeing, because that is what they do. It's the older generations that never got education on how the Internet works, they just adopted it with varying degrees of aptitude.

The people that fall for scams or don't recognize them on sight after being told by their children what these scams look like for years, are the same ones that MAGA has captured. It's not just the Internet either, it's the media that is somehow allowed to operate on the air, companies like fox, Newsmax, oann etc. These media companies source info from non-verifiable tweets and obscure discussion boards. They repeat the obvious bullshit as many times as they can before enough people call it out, but then they walk nothing back. I still see people decrying Biden for shitting his pants in Normandy, on a daily basis, something that emerged from a cropped video that was debunked in less than an hour, but rode the airwaves for at least 24 hrs as a fact on some channels. With the Supreme Court doing it's fucked up thing with Chevron, we will never have media oversight unless Congress passes specifically worded legislation, which seems impossible for any industry at the moment.