Should we believe anything on the internet?

Why I think the bar for quality & trust needs to increase for the content we consume

Hey friends 👋

I came across a few incidents in the past month which made me question the way I consume content on the internet. Especially informative content as opposed to entertainment. I used to trust any content on the internet that was well-produced and presented with facts. Well, I’m not the same anymore. I realised that my bar for trust has been very low and let me explain why I say so.

From Unsplash

I consume a lot of content on the internet. It’s the primary source of my knowledge and information. I consume content through social media platforms, articles, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos and whatnot. I have access to all the content from around the world at my fingertips. Yet, I don’t know what to trust and what not to.

Last month, I was watching a YouTube documentary titled: Crypto: The World’s Greatest Scam ¹. The video talked about various instances where people have been scammed by the founders of tech companies, artists, and even mainstream celebrities in the name of crypto. The video was wonderfully produced and drove the point home. It did state true facts about the scams to support its arguments. But the other side of the same picture was missing.

Though all the stated events about the scams in the video were true, the video did not care to understand the positive side of the same technology. It never tried to explain why crypto technology is legit in a few ways. The video started with a bias stating that crypto is a scam and it explains why it is so.

There are other similar cases as well. I blindly used to trust a YouTube channel named Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell ². Videos are extremely well-produced and heavily researched. On top of that, Kurzgesagt claims to be a majorly community-funded media house. Everything seemed like a utopia until I came across this video from a channel named The Hated One: How Kurzgesagt Cooks Propaganda For Billionaires ³.

I was devastated after watching the video. The video explains why one should not trust Kurzgesagt. I was clearly not expecting this from a channel I trusted so much. But right after the video, Kurzgesagt themselves published a response stating the opposite. To which the creator of the video again published his response. Tik Tok Tik Tok.

Description of The Hated One’s video on Kurzgesagt

After all this drama, I can never trust Kurzgesagt like the way I did before. In fact, Kurzgesagt was one media outlet that I trusted blindly. Which was not the right thing to do in the first place. So the whole of the internet seems untrustworthy to me. Most of the content that’s published on the internet that goes viral is adulterated in one way or the other. Do you remember watching The Social Dilemma documentary that only talked about the negative side of social media? It’s the same thing with most content on the internet.

I did some reading and put some thought into understanding why this happens again and again. Also, I have a suggestion on how things can change for the better: both at the macro & micro levels. Let’s dive deeper.

Influencer echo chamber

Going back to the crypto scam documentary on YouTube. One of the important reasons I trusted the video was because it was endorsed (or appreciated might be the right word to use) by Marques Brownlee, A tech YouTuber, who I have been following for a decade and respect his views.

Comment to the Crypto: The World’s Greatest Scam video

This has a very important perspective on the story. Most of the content consumed on the internet is created by very few percentages of people. The internet is driven by influences. People follow influencers, who in turn produce content for people to consume. So we are slowly pushed into an echo chamber of influencers to consume our content. The trust built by these influencers is incomparable, so we tend to trust whatever they end up saying or believing.

This phenomenon has gotten better over the past few decades. Previously, there were only a few centralised media outlets that controlled all of the narratives. The influence has now been democratised but still has not reached an ideal state. Most of the media is still controlled by centralised outlets & independent influencers.

Sure, everything works well if we can find influencers or media outlets that are truly unbiased & produce only balanced content. This takes me to the next point:

Facts don’t spread, only stories do

Facts are not a great way to communicate information. They are the underlying essence of every piece of information but they fail to spread from one person to another. This is because humans remember facts only when they communicate emotion.

There is a wonderful talk by Simon Sinek titled: Start with why: - how great leaders inspire action ⁴. He talks about the importance of communicating the “why” of the information rather than just presenting them as facts.

In short, Simon Sinek says that the human brain is receptive to taking action only when information is conveyed through emotions. One needs to communicate directly to the limbic brain that’s responsible for all of our feelings, human behaviour and decision-making.

All creators want to establish trust and drive behaviour. So they communicate directly to the limbic brain with stories. Stories can make you feel something and drives you to take action such as sharing, subscribing or even making a financial transaction.

Storytelling is an extremely powerful tool.

And that is why the Internet is full of stories. Stories act like a vehicle to communicate facts & ideas. No one wants to create well-balanced content that talks for both sides because a good story starts with bias and conviction. Stories are designed to move you and not to keep you informed. Thus we end up in a trap where we hear only stories from a single perspective.

Everyone has an agenda

You may ask why people need to spread their ideas so broadly all the time. True, they need not. But everyone has an agenda. If the incentives are not aligned in creating content that doesn’t spread, people will not create those content. Creators need to make money or become popular. You cannot stop them from using the tools to get what they need.

Not only this, but creators also use “storytelling” as a tool to communicate the ideas they believe in. In most cases, the agenda is hidden behind the content and not exposed to the consumers. Things are reaching an extent where creators are not even open to disclosing the sponsorship details for their content. They are trying to hide them instead of being explicit about them. Why? Financial incentives FTW.

Link to tweet

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There are tons of other reasons for this to happen as well. With all of them, it becomes very hard to decide the content to consume and trust. There is no easy way out of this. The balanced perspective is hidden deep inside the weeds, which requires work from our side to figure things out.

I have decided to be more cautious of trusting information that presents only one side of the story. A good example is the Kurzgesagt and The Hated One situation. You have both voices speaking for themselves and now it’s you who needs to dive deeper into the information to figure things out for yourself. It is extremely hard to do this, but there seems to be no other way to reach the truth or a balanced perspective.

One more activity that helped me understand things better is having conversations. Having conversations with people who have other perspectives and truly trying to understand their point. It can be with a closed group of people or friends. But conversations help. Remember that, consuming content is a one-way interaction where there is no space to ask questions.

At a platform level, I would love to see a version of the Twitter community notes feature implemented across the web. It would be amazing to see an opposing perspective on a topic right after consuming content. It is hard for individuals to tell a balanced story that’s compelling. But I think it’s very much possible for a platform to couple 2 compelling stories of opposite perspectives and share them with the audience.

I understand it’s not easy. It’s way more complicated than it sounds. But as an optimist, I believe that consuming balanced perspectives can be achieved sometime in the future.

“It's not easy, but it's simple.” ― Eric Thomas

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💫 This week in Read Write Run

📝 Best articles I’ve read:

• Peter Thiel’s Religion (Super long essay but it has a ton of ideas and perspectives)

  Here’s how Thiel would respond to my imitative instincts: Be careful who you copy. If you’re going to follow a role model, find one who you won’t compete with. Don’t look to your peers for answers. Find somebody in a different stage of life who you admire and respect. They should be somebody who defied the status quo and took an independent path. In life, you have two options: (1) you can dispassionately accept the universe for what it is, or (2) you can put your dent in it. But you can’t do both.

• The Power of Anti-Goals (Very short essay on setting Anti-Goals)

  Charlie Munger, who is fond of saying “tell me where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”
  

  He’s talking about inversion, the idea that problems are often best solved when they are reversed. That it’s often easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do.

🎙 Best podcast I’ve listened to:

• An inside look at how Figma builds products | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)

  Data Insights, research insights that were memefied to the point where anyone can reference an insight in the middle of a meeting. You know that you've really done your job as a researcher or a data scientist or a product manager if people are able to do that.

📹 Best videos/movies I’ve watched:

• KD Engira Karuppudurai (Soulful, sweet, heartwarming and hilarious movie about a relationship between an old man who is about to die and an orphan kid who grew up in a temple)

  

🏃 Follow my running journey

• I ran for 5 days this week and 5 km per run. Fantastic week, now I’m trying to improve my cadence to avoid impact injuries. You can follow me on Strava.

1. Crypto: The World’s Greatest Scam. - watch the video here

2. Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - check out the channel

3. How Kurzgesagt Cooks Propaganda For Billionaires - watch the video here

4. Starting with Why - watch the video here