Here’s a small example of someone who’s apparently angry about something they know little about. All too common in this world overloaded with too much information:
He’s concerned that Rapid City’s “7% Vision Fund tax” needs to be done away with – and of course the roads fixed to perfection.
Well, if the Vision Fund tax was 7%, I would agree it needs to be eliminated. But it’s not – it is 1/2 of one percent. That’s .5% not 7%. It’s 1/2 of .01 cent, not 7 cents on the dollar. So how did this person get it so wrong? How did they inflate the tax by 1300%? The answer seems obvious.
This person is either uninformed or misinformed. If they are uninformed, they used their ignorance of the issue to lash out publicly… to vent unintelligibly. The anonymous Two Cents forum attracts such comments, as do other anonymous social media forums. But this person is in good company:
Recently President Trump announced that prescription drug prices were going to be reduced by “1000%, 1100%, 1200%, 1300%, 1400%” and ” not 30 or 40 or 50%, but numbers the likes of which you’ve never even dreamed of before.”
Well, he’s right about one thing, I have never dreamt of the pharmacy paying me to get a prescription filled. If you think about it:
A prescription that costs $50, if offered at 50% off would cost $25.00. If offered at 100% off would be free. If offered at 1400% off …… the cost would be -$650. Thats negative $650. In other words, the pharmacy would owe you $650! So where did the President come up with these figures? Who knows, but what is truly shocking is that people defended him on social media. One commenter posted “Nobody have calculators on their phone? …. 100-1000% = 10.”
I asked ChatGPT to explain how something could be reduced by 1000%. The response was: “1000% off is mathematical absurdity” and further “any claim of 1000% off is either a joke, a mistake or marketing nonsense.”
So why would people believe things like this? Why does the person believe the Vision tax is 7%? This is the problem without a solution, but the internet obviously has undue influence or is taking the place of people using their own brains to form opinions.
It is estimated that 20% of all social media interactions are the doing of Bots (software that performs automated tasks). So when internet ramblings occur, and people blindly believe what they read or hear, then people are misinformed. It is also estimated that in 10 years, as much as 70% of social media interactions will be bots. The question need to ask yourself is: why are the bots posting on social media?
A 2023 paper from the University of Southern California projected that if current bot development trends continue, bot posts will outnumber human posts by 2030.
Will the internet ever lose credibility? I doubt it. Because the chronically uninformed are always seeking to be informed and misinformation satisfies that – especially if they can blab on about it, in an anonymous platform.
The internet is an excellent place to acquire knowledge and find soluti0ns to problems, but great care must be used, in other words one must still use their brain to vet that information.
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Our communities are divided: politics, gender, capitalism, socialism, and the list goes on. One major cause is the unwillingness of people to seek out facts.
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