cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21782844
Tru
The key phrase for primary sources is “trust, but verify”. That means listening to the primary source, and then do the legwork yourself to verify. Verify doesn’t mean asking the primary source for a source, it means figuring it out for yourself. A claim like “they’re eating the pets” gets readily debunked as soon as you start looking for evidence.
That approach may work for journalism and such, with a single person collecting primary sources and verifying them before writing an article. However, it does not work on the internet.
Instead of one person verifying the claim and adding further sources in an article, every single reader would have to do it. And anyone using the internet would have to do so hundreds of times every day. Nobody does that. It only makes sense to shift the burden of further proof onto the primary source or disregard it.
