Misinformation

One has to figure out what to make of news items. Polls may be properly taken and not manipulated, but as polls at this point are +/-4% accuracy, they mean nothing. You can follow the polls going up and down on some news item, such as Israel. Those items do affect the election, but only about two weeks before the election. The general public, voters, has no memory of things half a year before.

More worrying is the misinformation, fake videos and so on. The video clips may be real, but even the Biden campaign clips the worst bits together. In the case of Trump, hearing a whole minute of his speech comapred to the ten seconds does not improve it much. His attention span in the strream of consciousness speeches is not that long. He has no theme other than "The US is going to hell" and "they are invading our country." Underlying is the basic theme all the way back to Reagan: government is evil, taxes are bad.

Controlling social media will do little, but it is nevertheless necessary for the craziest conspiracies. It will help. But not much.

As the case of women in developing countries shows, only education will help us move to a world where we have some control of the material that is fed to us on a daily basis. That and the mute button on your TV remote.

The Internet is a worse situation than the TV, as you can follow links fed to you and go "down the rabbit hole" as we say. Young people and seniors are most at risk. The working age public is exposed to friends and coworkers daily who will guide them and also expose them to a variety of views. Simply hearing that normal people have a variety of views on Israel and Palestine for example introduces a healthy discussion. As opposed to screaming at peole on message boards and social media.

Tucker Carlson famously "proved" that mostly immigrants and illegals are serving time for felonius crimes. But those crimes were related to being illegals such as staying here with no visa! None of those crimes were against American Citizens.

The education really should start in high school. Show them that if you Google these two items you will get two different results (as well as paid ads related to it):

1 vaccines cause autism

2 vaccines do not cause autism

Vaccines cause an immediate reaction, which may be severe for a few days for some. That is in fact your immune system working. 

Similarly, try googling these:

1 Is crime increasing?

2 Is crime decreasing?

The second will give these. Also, use Bing or other searches to check on Google.

The search engines are put together to give you answers you would like, based on your search hisrory. Not so much the facts. This keeps you browsing and getting them ad income.