Evan Osnos Quotes

2012 was the year I saw Twitter as a negative. More people need to realise that not everything they read is true and that Internet trolls are a real problem.

We live in a world with fake news being put out there. You don't really know what to trust, and it's a real danger to society.

If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

A labouring man ... read and study halfe his time, and then be at a loss to know what is true and what not. Thus the few have almost ruined the Libberty of the press.

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

Reading newspapers in the state of Maine is like paying somebody to tell you lies.

All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news. We must try to squeeze this without stepping on freedom of speech and of the press, but we must also help the reader.

I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.

We are not going to get rid of the digital media - nor should we want to - and so our challenge is to use the media to determine the truth, rather than to let the media obfuscate matters.

Unfortunately, often found next to things that are true are an enormous number of things that are not - in websites, videos, books and on social media.

The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.

Whenever journalism students ask me what they should be doing, I say that if you're on social media, you should be following a ton of people that you don't necessarily agree with just to get their perspectives.

All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.

There's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

In the Internet age, with the screaming on the radio, etc., it is hard to know what to believe and who is informed and who is not.

Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

Those who do not read the news are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed.

The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge.