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.
It must be nice to have a government that takes reasonable action when the social contract goes wrong instead of “Thoughts and prayers. Here. Have more poorly trained cops.”
Better late than never I guess.
Oh, now we need critical thinking skills.
I’m highly skeptical of teaching critical thinking, personally. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
Twenty years too late.
To be fair every school I ever went to in the US said they were teaching critical thinking skills but never directly tackled it. And I think that’s a big problem. We need to teach people a specific set of skills.
