Originally Posted by
John2
I have a lot of sympathy for the baby boomers. Generations before mine never had the internet, had very few news sources to choose from, and generally even though there was often a political bias - complete misinformation was quite rare.
In this context, it makes complete sense... but it still shocks me just how vulnerable this generation is to misinformation.
There's the more beneign, you see it with baby boomers on facebook who share posts that are often AI generated with some sort of picture of a sad looking homeless person or military veteran or disabled child asking "why doesn't anybody like this".
Or course, people do share posts like this in their thousands. And the creators keep a big database of all the gullible people who share them so they can target them for scams - which is why you'll get the same types of people occasionally having their accounts hacked.
Then, there's the less benign misinformation, that you get gullible people like Brin - accepting it unquestionably as fact that the attacker was an asylum seeker - sharing a provocative post with a fake name designed to invoke the type of rioting and unrest we are seeing from the far right.
And then these same people wonder why the country is heading the direction it is...
As I say, I'm sympathetic to why people are vulnerable to misinformation.
It's just ironic the lack of self-awareness from people who share misinformation, glad that they're the ones that "see things as they are".
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