Asklemmy

44170 readers

1405 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Teaching children about online manipulation without creating a paranoid world view subject to manipulation? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 years ago by phase_change@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ok, this is not going to be a well formulated question, because the concerns behind it are nebulous in my own head.

Some assumptions I have, that clearly inform the question that follows: I believe commercial, state, and others have sophisticated methods of influencing what I see on social media and thus, in part, what I think. I also believe that someone more willing to believe in the types of conspiratorial beliefs I’ve just expressed are more likely to be manipulated by information they’re exposed to. And, yes, I fully appreciate the irony of those beliefs.

My child is adult enough that belief patterns I encourage are very unlikely to become deep patterns. That is, I’d have to work to indoctinate my son, and he’d actively resist if my indoctrination was outside of societal norms.

He didn’t grow up exposed to the social media I suspect children do now.

How does a parent inoculate a child to the influence of social media without also creating a mindset willing to believe in a nebulous “them” that controls things—a mindset, I believe, that makes a person more likely to be controlled?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I have a few thoughts on that one. First, I‘d try and teach that changing one‘s opinion based on new information is good and admirable and that not knowing something or not having an opinion on something one doesn‘t understand is fine.

Specifically for media, something like this paper is excellent though obviously not child friendly, I think even way too little adults are aware of this sort of framing that media and companies regularly do:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334400431_Controlling_the_Narrative_An_Initial_Investigation_of_Doublespeak

So trying to show/explain, how does framing something differently change the perceptions of people?

Another important thing in my mind is teaching something like Plato‘s allegory of the cave, so how we are presented the world is how we see the world and nobody knows everything about it because we only see a small part of it. That ties back in with my point about it being good to question one‘s beliefs from time to time.