Usually reading the news from a so-called "trusted source of information " means we can believe what is written.
Recently, in a flood of posts on Twitter, now X, I came upon a retweet of one Turkish journalist with a sizeable number of followers reading something like, "This feels like the end of an era," and more below an original post of someone else sharing that the great Noam Chomsky had passed away.
Recalling that I had read another piece of information, well, again on the same medium, on how the health of Chomsky was deteriorating only days or weeks earlier, I thought, "Indeed, another prolific life belonging to some other time has come to an end."
For instance, I believed that what I read was true, only to be debunked some moments and (for real) hours later. Gladly, having at least a bit of journalistic spirit after reading the social media post, I went on to search whether any large international newspaper or any famous portal had shared anything similar – to discover only in a few minutes there was more news like "Noam Chomsky is alive and in Brazil" and "Chomsky's wife on his health..." than any news or official statement that would confirm he had passed away. So, it seems like it is not true, and I gave myself time to really get to know which of these readings would turn out to be right. But what about those who don't check a second source of information?
Now, when I think, it would be so ironic for someone with such a profound mark on human history and philosophy to be part of such misinformation, but, well, we cannot neglect that he was. In today's world, labeled with rapid production and consumption of everything – both in the online space and in real terms – at times it might be hard to drive lines regarding the importance of speed. But when it comes to journalism, or at least what is left of it, accuracy should be in the first line of priorities.
For some, we might feel lucky to live in an era when much of what we can learn is at the tips of our fingers. We process news smoothly and often without any obstruction, owing to the fast-speed internet and interrupted round-the-clock connection. But in a way, this leaves us exposed to a constant flow of unpolished, unfinished, often old or misleading content that we continue to consume.
Noam Chomsky most certainly is not a persona entirely belonging to this kind of era. What caught my attention, or at least according to the guest essay co-authored by Chomsky earlier last year, appears at the top of countless adjectives that can be tied to him. He also appears as a bit of an AI skeptic. In times when discussion revolves around the role of AI in different industries, the labor force or even in newsrooms and its impact on disinformation, it was interesting to see an intellectual who spent decades influencing crucial concepts of human development find this new wave of technology to be "hyped." Writing for the New York Times, the authors, including Chomsky, said: "The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations."
Although, in a way, my own mind went to look for other data points to get more information about that specific event involving Chomsky, I find it notable that I did not bow down to what was incorrect, specifically due to this "elegant system" that differentiates us from machines and gives us the possibility to rationally look through details before jumping to conclusions.
Some of the news websites that rushed to share the news of the death, meanwhile, are said to have taken it down soon after. Thank you, Noam Chomsky, for reminding us of the importance of misinformation!
