So do you think the internet is medium uncover the truth or does it help to obfuscate it?

[Mangalore]

Really, since we see the full effects of full blown information campaigns concerning various conflicts as well as the ability of every person to chip in his opinion wherever he or she likes, be it Twitter, Facebook, comment sections to news articles or at forums just like this one. Do you believe this data overloads helps or hinders a good discussion about the facts or effects of an event?

You can also extend this to the effects of s who are often based on false facts or on events blown out of proportion aka back in the good old days it would have been a personal dispute instead of a public defamation campaign.

I'm really wondering. There is so much data and information at one's fingertips but you can get literally overloaded with data, swamped with conflicting opinions and truth claims, abuse and trolling and general nastiness that in the end I'm pondering if I wouldn't been better informed by knowing less but better filtered commentaries and articles. At least the biases would be clearer to deduct the actual known facts from several sources.

And no, this is not primary about the Mudpit. You stumble over heated dispute in any comment section of well known news sites, but also the frequency and amount of twitter posts, blog articles and other sources often added to such media completely overtakes everything.

[Phier]

I really miss the early internet. Humanities majors hadn't figured out how to log on. Almost no one over 30 was there, or under 18. Information you could find was mostly just that, no spin.

A bunch of college science majors having a nerd party...

Then about 1997-8 I saw people starting to show their less nerdy acquaintances how to use "email" and that was when things started to go down hill.

Now the internet is just like anything else in life. Lots of good, and some evil screwing it all up. The internet is still a great to uncover the truth, but you have to be good at filtering out the crap. Based on how many people believe Onion stories are real, this is not a skill everyone has.

On the plus side, people no longer come into my office with a giant stack of print outs they printed from online.

[sumskilz]

I'm going to say it's a net positive for those with some degree of an open mind, but it also provides a tremendous opportunity to live in a world that is entirely based on confirmation bias.

[Condottiere 40K]

Godwin's law (or Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)[1][2] is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" [2][3]—​ that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.
Promulgated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,[2] Godwin's Law originally referred, specifically, to Usenetnewsgroup discussions.[4] It is now applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms and blog comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles and other rhetoric.[5][6]

[Napoleonic Bonapartism]

Its good in that it allows the contending parties in any dispute to access relevant information, sources etc. in a dispute, in order to try and assert the truth in an argument. However both sides have equal access to information, and there are such vast quantities of it on either side of a debate, and people on the internet very rarely ever back down from their respective positions that instead of arriving at truth it simply results in ever more elaborate arguments on either side - and spamming.
One of the problems as I see it is that almost every comment section on Youtube ends up being a debate about the existance of the Almighty, with two sets of equally angry people on either side, with almost no intellectual respect for anything the opposition says - just accusations of everything from outright lying to insanity, not a good dialectic to arrive at truth with.

[Phier]

I can't find the link, but in the early 1900's a newspaper did a bit of "reader comments" where they would post back and forth comments. One of the subjects was on a food item (some fatty thing I forget the name of) and the comments between two readers could have come out of any internet debate or youtube comments section.

Basically things change, people don't.

[Napoleonic Bonapartism]

I can't find the link, but in the early 1900's a newspaper did a bit of "reader comments" where they would post back and forth comments. One of the subjects was on a food item (some fatty thing I forget the name of) and the comments between two readers could have come out of any internet debate or youtube comments section.

Basically things change, people don't.

There's this quite good Youtube Channel where they recreate Youtube Comment sections between two actors.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcK...WDQ_PwoVuQ1ImQ

It shows what I mean when I say they don't challenge their opponent on an intellectual level, they just end up making petty personal attacks. The X-Box vs. PlayStation debate is particularly heated.
Edit: And how can I forget the Nelson Mandela debate, the ignorance on display challenges the very notion that Google exists.

[Eleril]

I've been thinking almost the same thing for the past several months.Now that we live in a world in which information about anything and everything is readily available literally a click away,we seem more ignorant than ever.It's kind of ironic,if you think about it.In this day and age the most useful skill a person can have,IMHO,is the ability to discern useful information in all the traffic.That's because with all the info and current news in the interwebs,the truth about a certain matter is bound to be found.

[Emperor Arcturus Mengsk]

You see Eleril that is an illusion though. We are the most knowledgable generation by far.

The reason we seem more ignorant than ever is because the amount of information became literally endless really fast.

The amount of knowledge an average person could have before the internet was Books/TV/Gossip.

Before TV it was just Books/Gossip.

Talking about bias there.

[Condottiere 40K]

The next stage has to be gatekeeping.

Having something filtering out or directing you to your preferred forms of sites or information presentation.

[Lord of Nihilism]

I would have to say the internet provides both a way for Government's and/or people to obfuscate the truth, as well as share credible information to a large amount of people. It's really a double-edged sword if you think about it; on one hand, you have the NSA, the Russians, the ISIS and etc using the internet and media to launch information wars, and effectively distort the actual truth and feeding the common peasant propaganda, but there's also instances where the internet was able to reveal important information that needed to be known to a substantial amount of people, who otherwise wouldn't have known.

As with most things, i'm indifferent to the internet since it does have its uses but ultimately useless.