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title: Wiki tutorial

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# Wiki tutorial

What is at risk is the potential fragmentation of society as result of manipulative seeding of doubt and ignorance when we embrace the internet and similarly new technologies, or so suggests danah boyd. Robert Proctor and Iain Boal created the term “agnotology” to describe the strategic manufacturing of ignorance as “a tool of oppression by the powerful.” Agnotology threatens knowledge itself, its production, our selection of it, and our access to it. With young people using the internet, specifically social and news media, as the primary source of information, propagandists and fake news leaders can cause them to be unable to detect fact from lies. Conspiratorial and manipulative content is pushed to the top of search results, data voids are filled with doubtful information, and terms are created or co-opted to fragment knowledge and structure. 

Agnotology’s power was especially prevalent in 2020, and is projected to also be this year, with the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers of coronavirus. For example, [93% of BLM protests being peaceful,](https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/) many people continue to believe that they are largely violent and destructive as a result of biased, disproportionate media coverage. Even as someone knowledgeable about the BLM movement, I initially questioned if protests were primarily peaceful or violent simply due to the vast amounts of violent videos I’ve seen. White supremacists gaslight and hide black individuals’ experiences to further their oppression. On a different note, when any government official posts about coronavirus prevention on social media, the comments are flooded by anti-maskers with misleading links invalidating the science of masks’ effectiveness. The bias that results from these two examples are detrimental to our pursuit for truth. 
    
My concern is, if danah boyd claims that the internet, social media, and news media are vehicles for agnotology and epistemological fragmentation, how can we combat the spread of misinformation? Social media platforms try to moderate content but it is so easy to evade them, as the terrorist of Christchurch did.

![blm protestors protect police officer](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/06/05/PLOU/5fbd6051-bbcc-4ceb-a3b3-c6cb00c31acb-RiotMSC40.jpg)

[![blm video](http://img.youtube.com/vi/BF9qi-FTTz4/0.jpg)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF9qi-FTTz4 "blm video")

![anti-maskers](https://i.imgur.com/E0HpHxs.jpg)