The speed(and innocence) of Fake News
and some hope for self-policing in the marketplace of ideas
One of my students shared during class yesterday about the dangers of his peers mindlessly consuming TikTok videos as pure fact in class yesterday.
Today, this came up on my feed (Note to self: why am I still on TikTok?):
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Hopefully, typical_democrat’s mistakes really echoed my student’s ire and doubts about “News-Tok”. Especially if we note that typical_democrat is a loud voice on the platform, with about half a million followers.
To me, that he is a serious content creator means that didn’t make this mistake by being trigger-happy. Mistakes like this will cost him followers. I’d like to think that the pressure to rush things out reduces the time/manpower needed to fact-check.
But umeboi’s response also makes me optimistic that there’s some level of self-policing that can happen in TikTok’s marketplace of ideas.