Hot take: emotional labour is certainly a thing - and a sucky thing at that - but telling people who ask questions about your area of expertise to “just Google it” in the fake news era is putting a hell of a lot of trust in an algorithm that doesn’t distinguish true from false.
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If you Google for topics like black deaths in police shootings or which gender wins more custody battles, I guarantee some of the top results will be from deliberately biased and frequently inaccurate sources, because THE ALGORITHM DOES NOT CARE.
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I’m not saying you always owe every stranger your time and energy, especially if they’re engaging in bad faith. But we need to admit that just pointing someone towards the internet and saying “Educate yourself!” is part of how so many people now have terrible wrong opinions.
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Every anti-vaxxer thinks they’ve educated themselves online, because they did what everyone said to do - they looked things up! But the people who bothered to steer their initial search had an agenda, they didn’t distinguish good sources from bad, and now they’re radicalised.
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This isn’t to say that search engines are useless, either. But looking for a *specific* source using *specific* language is different to exhorting a confused fencesitter to type in a generic inquiry about a complex issue.
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I understand that the burden of explanation falls too often on the exhausted; that people need money to live. But the only cure for an internet whose layout inherently level-fields lies and gossip with facts is to re-instill its users with a respect for experts and expertise -
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- and that can’t happen if the received wisdom tells those experts not to waste their energy, to refuse to explain; to palm their interlocutors off on the same amoral search engines whose results have built their ignorance in the first place.
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The mob sealioning and bad faith tactics of the alt-right online this past decade have had an end goal all along, and it was this: to make the left so hostile to explaining itself and its theories that the willingness of extremists to chat looks rational by comparison.
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I know we’re all tired of explaining why we deserve to have equal rights; to exist; to be treated as people. But knowing how much disinformation is out there, just telling people to research it as though the truth is obvious will do us more harm than good in the long run. FIN
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Replying to @fozmeadows
This sounds like a task for the allies! Step in and help answer questions and have these conversations when it’s clear the affected party is exhausted or wary of bad faith questioners.
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