True or False?

We constantly receive information in the 24 hours we get in a day. A primary source of how we know things is when someone says something to us. For example, friends tell you that secret gossip, or you watch a video on YouTube, etc.

If we start looking at things from an early age, people might have been learning about new cooking methods, plants they should not eat, etc. The geo-radius of information travel was a few miles. And the information was limited.

The geo-radius kept increasing to cover the whole world over time and the rate at which information travels through this distance. In the last century, delivering a message to someone on the other side of the country/world would take days. Right now, the duration is in order of seconds.

Taking a step back, how do we accept/reject some information we receive? For instance, if I say to you that I was the one who taught Lebron how to play basketball, you would laugh and think I am an idiot. There are some statements that are facts, some either true or false.

The way we decide whether true/false relies on trust. For instance, when I read something like “XYZ is coming to ABC or XYZ is hired/fired, etc.” from a big media house or official source, we would believe it and consider the information as True (at least we used to, I will come back to this) however, if the same information is shared by an anonymous user on Reddit with the username melon_kusk and ape-club profile picture, the probability of trusting the information as truth is very less.

On the other hand, the pace at which information is generated is massive. Thanks to AI, generating data to spoof/fraud something is easier than ever. Information authenticity is in trouble when data increases with a bad Signal to Noise ratio. Lack of authenticity has many potential issues in the trust-reliant Internet. We are gonna ask this question recursively: Is this True or False?

It is not fun or good for anyone. How can we solve this? It may sound naive, but in my opinion, limiting the information flow is one way to solve the issue. Putting it at a high level, let the noise multiplier be n and signal in information be I, we get n*I, and we can either reduce n or I.

Intuition:

• Many years down the lane, sugar used to be a luxury item. Then, it became available to everyone and a common household item. Now, we try to avoid sugar, and sugar-free foods are a huge market.
• The Internet (read: all the content we get there) has a similar trajectory, and we are in the household commodity phase. For instance, in my childhood, I had to go to internet cafes that ran on the pay-per-hour model if I wanted to use a computer and the internet. For a while, 1GB of data was like 3 USD. With the arrival of JIO and Cheap smartphones, everything changed in India. Data has become super cheap, and everyone has access to view and extend all the content on the internet. (Like a common household commodity: read sugar). Few have realized the harms of excessive internets, such as the harms of excessive sugar. Sooner or later, many people will realize this and move towards consuming less information