Asklemmy

You read multiple sources and look for the facts, not declarations of victory or failure.

Like how Milei is, by his own statements, anti-union, anti-LGBT, anti-pension, anti-abortion, anti-vaxx, pro-military/intelligence industry, pro-genocide in Palestine, and pro-unregulated crypto. All of which I don't like personally; I'm not an anarchocapitalist. I don't really care if one financial metric goes up or down that some will hail as "success" if the lives of so many are made significantly worse in the exchange.

That's the thing: You can't unless you are already well-informed beforehand.

Yes, it is possible to spot common rhetorical deceptions such as whataboutisms or straw man arguments, but misinformation in general is impossible to debunk in real time unless it defies common sense such as "Immigrants are eating the pets of locals".

A popular talking point here in Germany when the government was trying to push for installing heat pumps instead of gas or oil based heating solutions was, that installing a heat pump would entail massive renovation costs to make its use viable. This information is semi true because installing a pump in older buildings might indeed require renovations. But exposing this argument as a broad overgeneralization takes so much time and effort that it is impossible to do on the spot, unless you have prepared multiple examples of home configurations and the associated costs of installing a heat pump.

The whole idea behind Steve Bannon's famous tactic of "flooding the zone" is to flood the discussion with so much misinformation it would take a disproportionately amount of time to debunk it all.

TBH I don't bother with watching discussions anymore because of this.

how do you try to discern in real time what is misleading?

That's really hard. Unless you're in a position where your opinion will have an influence (ie, you're a judge, cop, or protestor who can take part in the event), you might as well wait a couple of days for more information to come out.

We've done ourselves a massive disservice by subjecting everything to constant, immediate analysis. Most of the time, we can afford to wait and learn more.

One thing that will help is separating between if a policy is effective in achieving a political goal and if achieving the political goal over other political goals is effective.

Honestly (and unfortunately), the Financial Times or something like that supplemented by regular media. I’m not endorsing paid financial news sites as your only source of news or anything. But rich people pay for those newspapers specifically because they filter the signal from the noise. It’s more like a hack to see what’s important since they don’t report on drama and intrigue and their whole raison d’être is giving investors facts, quickly.

Bonus fact: basically all their paywalls are permeable. But if you need to check if a story is “important,” see what’s being covered — or more importantly, not covered — for people wearing fancy pants. Bullshit is free so free media often shovels a lot on top of the real story.