Quote Originally Posted by Helz View Post
Ideas are living things and they travel between living things. Here is a good example of it in 2 ways (Please watch that video and consider how belief structures are pushed independent of facts)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pnpM7Yx05Q

Notice the rhetoric that builds the social issue. I could easily throw another 100 references of people that want to spell out some mix of 'cops bad, cops racist, cops evil' ect where its blatantly apparent. At this point its not about arguing about 'what' happened but rather about how people receive information. You have to not only consider the information that is available but also how the conclusion was drawn about the information.
That video. Eww. Misinformation and how it becomes an issue is an interesting topic that does affect freedom in our societies, but getting every single member of a society, or even just a majority of people, to understand neutral fact-checking, and even more to actually do it, seems rather utopian. That does hurt our freedom, and it's part of the ways that can be used to control the masses; you can probably find a lot of very clear and obvious examples under nazism. Convincing people that "Poland had attacked Germany" is one.

How do you fight this, though? The answer comes back to the previous point: improving education and quality of life will allow people to have a better judgement and more tools to fight misinformation.