Naomi Wolf Quotes

I think there is a danger when it comes to fake news because there is some fake news out there, but there's also a danger when you only hear back to you the beliefs you already have.

What Americans seem to prefer — or at least the subset of them who live on social media — is a private square of people who already agree with them. The most successful of these preachers we call “influencers,” which basically means they get paid to manipulate you, and somehow you listen to them anyway.

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

The second the news comes on TV, people turn it off or tune it out. People don't want to hear the other side.

The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

One of the great ironies of American political life in the 2020s is that the people most exercised about the spread of false information are frequently peddlers of it. Their lack of self-understanding arises from the belief that the primary factor separating their side from the other side isn’t ideology, principle or moral vision but information—raw data requiring no interpretation and no argument over its importance. It is a hopelessly simpleminded worldview—no one apprehends reality without the aid of interpretive lenses.

All Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas or even adjusting them—the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.

Be able to notice all the confusion between fact and opinion that appears in the news.

Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices.

We live in an age where people can not only choose their own sources, but they can choose their own facts.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

The danger of the blogosphere is reading only those you agree with. While there are right-wing blogs that are entertaining freak shows, it's hard to find substantial journalism there.

Politics is always antagonistic and tribalistic. But social media puts us in isolated information bubbles. We're not just disagreeing on politics. We're disagreeing on reality in very fundamental ways.

Fake news and rumors thrive online because few verify what's real and always bias towards content that reinforces their own biases.

If you want to understand why a minority of American voters are unplugged from the fact-based news that the rest of the country depends on, just imagine being told multiple times a day that real news is a hoax.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.

Technology has allowed the creation of media echo chambers, so that a person can reinforce, rather than debate, viewpoints.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

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.

All this is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it helps people establish what they value; they understand the sort of ideas they identify with. The curse is that they aren't challenged in their views. The Internet becomes an echo chamber. Users don't see the counterarguments.

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.

For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

We begin to inhabit oppositional and rarely intersecting mental universes having to do with ideology and fact and non-fact and news and non-news.

We must combat misinformation that is being spread.

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.