The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That’s good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.

AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn’t enough. There’s another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don’t want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.

How long until some dumbfuck waste of carbon conservative declares this to be woke?

Or has it happened already?

Canada here. I feel like I wasn’t taught critical thinking, either directly (eg, how valid is an argument) or indirectly (eg, evaluating research), until undergraduate. High school didn’t really tap critical thinking. Science and math were about learning skills, history was just memorizing a narrative, English was reading comprehension, writing ability, and literary theory.

Also, in the last 15-20 years, we’ve went from widely thinking that online sources are untrustworthy and that using Wikipedia was lazy to the mainstream never talking about being a critical user of the online world and people from students to politicians using chatgpt to write their assignments.

On another note, I wonder if susceptibility to far-right misinformation is purely a critical thinking issue and not also about a lack of cultural/intersectional self-reflection and awareness. I spoke to a family member recently (we’re White), and he caught me completely off-guard by ranting about how White people are being erased (eg, no White people in a group of people in an ad he saw). I didn’t know how to respond - I think that’s an absurd concern - and I still don’t, but his perspective seemed informed by a lack of more than just critical thinking

Better late than never I guess.

The thing I always think about when someone says misinformation is who decides. The ministry of truth?

Oh, now we need critical thinking skills.

I’m highly skeptical of teaching critical thinking, personally. Isn’t that an oxymoron?