Personalized News and the Responsibility of Free Speech

In a world with 8 billion people, or in a country with 330 million, it's impossible for everyone to get everything they (think they) want. We're always going to have some reason to grumble, even if we have to make something up. For many, complaining is part of our personality. We can't take every dissatisfaction in our lives and treat it as a life-or-death issue.

I think personalized news feeds are one of the worst things we can do to a nation. If we're not all seeing the same stories, we'll never be on the same page. In the interest of not losing their users, websites filter out anything we aren't predetermined to want to see, to keep us comfortable and scrolling and seeing their ads. This shields us from the uncomfortable fact that things are going on that we don't like, and that people, who are otherwise just like us, have different opinions than us. I've blogged before about how we need a common enemy to rally us together, to unite for our own good. Within a couple of years we got one: a worldwide common threat to all nations. Still we managed to politicize it. Many said it was all the president's fault that it got as bad as it did. Others said it wasn't a real threat.

When people talk about "the right side of history," they're saying that, when future generations look back on this, the facts are going to seem pretty clear. They will look at the records of the pandemic toll, and they'll be compelled to think, "there were people who didn't believe in it? How could they not believe in it?" I feel fremdschämen for the people on that side. I imagine someone today saying that the Spanish flu epidemic (which killed my great-grandmother) never existed. You can draw your own parallels.

As the saying of debated origin goes, "History is written by the victor." That can lead us to believe that history is not always accurate, and that "fake news" has long been a plague on our cultures. I've often pointed out that the media and our sources of "news" can deceive us only so much. Someone will rise up and make plain the truth eventually. It's taken hundreds of years, but the truth of Christopher Columbus is finally coming out. So we know that "the truth is out there." The whitewashed history of the U.S. has been challenged throughout my lifetime, and is being further updated to reflect the non-white perspective. No matter how much "the man" may want you to believe one thing, the other things will make their way through. Sadly, many people seize upon this fact to advance what we know of as "conspiracy theories." The news of the day will rarely be as accurate as history, because of the way the facts seep through over time to give us the whole picture.

I think we need a clearer distinction between "news" and "opinion" stories. "News" would be required to contain only facts. Verifiable, unaccentuated facts. "Opinion" would be anything that mentions "right" or "wrong" or steers a reader in any direction on how to feel about the story. So pretty much all of CNN is "opinion." I can't really speak to Fox News, because I admittedly don't watch it. I also believe that our freedom of speech comes with responsibility; I am free to say what I want about Fox News, but I am not saying anything because I am not informed about it. While we have the freedom to say what we like, we have an obligation to know what we're talking about.

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