Recently, the US placed another rover on Mars, this time accompanied by a small copter drone that would do some proof-of-concept tests regarding self-directed, powered flight on Mars.China also recently landed a Mars rover.Some pretty cool stuff!https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/While the articles are pretty neat-o, the comment sections on most of these articles are a complete ****-show. Nearly half of the hundreds of comments are all crap about how it's all fake, the earth is flat, etc etc etc. Your basic troll fest, except that, sadly, *many* of those commenters truly seem to believe what they're arguing. Maybe this is par for the FB course, but I cant help feeling discouraged by the amount of deliberate, willful ignorance on display on so many science-oriented articles that I run across. Is this just an artifact of the kind of people who read stuff on FB, or do you guys think that this is a real reflection on the direction modern society is heading towards? If the latter, what can be done to stem this tide, either as an individual or as a society? Is this kind of thing common in all western countries, or is it more pronounced with American related articles?
It's not like other pro-science users are going to change the minds of the morons by rationally presenting facts and figures.
You think? Id say its better to have faith that people with false beliefs have the potential to be open minded enough and rational enough to change their minds once presented with logic. At least some. We hope.
What do you want Facebook to do about it? It's not like other pro-science users are going to change the minds of the morons by rationally presenting facts and figures.
I'm personally a fan of third party fact checking organizations. It would be awesome if there was some kind of way to establish a few of them as have iron-bound reputations as being politically neutral etc. ... It would be awesome, but I'm not sure it would be possible.
I'm not really sure that I want FB to do anything more than what they're already doing (ie adding disclaimers to provably false statements etc). I don't feel that it's the responsibility of private institutions to be gatekeepers. Also, if the platforms themselves get too involved, it will create all sorts of censorship issues and that can be a slippery slope, especially when boatloads of money are involved. I'm personally a fan of third party fact checking organizations. It would be awesome if there was some kind of way to establish a few of them as have iron-bound reputations as being politically neutral etc. Most of them do the best they can to navigate the bias minefields, but even the smallest, most momentary slips are immediately used as 'proof' by quacks that their tools of the right, or the left or whoever it is that's trying to correct their quackery. It would be awesome, but I'm not sure it would be possible.
