but sharing your hopes that we can springboard off that into a sensible discussion, I'll get a couple of points out of the way (and risk an alert myself for illustrative purposes).
Said OP who had his post hidden attracted my attention because we're from the same country - Scotland - but his take on the world differs from mine as much as if he were a martian.
He decried at great length the dangers of the baleful influence of Islam in our country when we have some 60,000-70,000 Muslims among a population of just over 5 million. He said he was worried about the safety of his cat-sitting neighbour at the hands of marauding Muslim refugees in the wake of the reported German molestations and worse, then couldn't understand why I defended Scotland and Scottish Muslims against what I saw as a seedy libel. Our Muslim population is of relatively long standing and is quite homogenous compared to some other parts of the country because of when they moved and settled - largely from Pakistan, largely comfortably middle-class and generally very aspirational. Our mosques have been investigated, and none of our Imams espouse or preach antisocial jihad. They have their own problems with younger members of the congregation trying to bring the old establishment more into line with the twenty-first century and counter entrenched patronage, but I see that as generational and a healthy development that they can sort out for themselves if given time. There are some identified problems with Muslim youth in Glasgow getting involved in gang culture, but that's more a Glasgow problem than necessarily a Muslim one.
Faced with that reality, I have to ask: What the hell do these people have to do before some of the more hotheaded among us get off their backs?
And as for refugees, in Scotland we're subject to UK government-imposed limits. We have long-standing issues with asylum-seekers, but they're to do with how appallingly they're treated, not how appallingly they behave. There's a modest refugee resettlement programme, which has seen families - heavily vetted, having spent substantial periods in refugee camps - installed in surplus social housing in locations like the Isle of Bute, and so far there don't seem to have been any serious problems apart from some predictable resentment from a vocal few that the likes of the Mail have given undue prominence.
Against this backdrop, said OP had been spending time on the Guardian's Comment Is Free section, and thus come to the firm conclusion from the trend of posts there that we were in an existential crisis about refugees and they posed a real threat that everyone was incensed about.
So, to cut this long story shorter, I'm hard put to take any of his own observations seriously, about the online world or the flesh-and-blood one outside our doors, having seen him swallowing whole an agenda that fit his own mindset and being unwilling to open up to alternative ways of seeing things.
That out of the way - me? I get less and less of my news nowadays from conventional media. I try to expose myself to it, as otherwise you don't know what others around you are responding to/talking about, but a lot of my information-gathering takes place via Twitter (where I don't even have an account). I've identified a number of people, and some journalists, whose judgment I have reason to trust from their past reactions, and I use them as a sort of network to sift through the vast amount of information out there. I'm not noticeably less well informed than when I used to avidly listen to/watch the news and devour broadsheets along with other sources. I get to act as my own editor and follow up stories that concern or interest me.
I see the shortcomings of conventional media as lying primarily at the editorial level - what gets covered in the first place - and then the slant that gets imposed on it.
DU has a similar role to play here, and I've posted more and spent more time here over the last year or two than in the past. But there's as much posted that I disagree as agree with.
The messages are as simplistic as you want them to be. You can kneejerk at some piece of news or an observation, but there's a whole universe out there of contradictions and alternatives if you've the time to explore them. It can certainly eat up time once you get into that sort of boundless surfing, and that's a luxury many people don't have. Which has its own ramifications for how people ingest their own favoured news sources. And then socially you get to test out your developed views against others' IRL, which can be an eye-opener at times.
We're certainly not subjected to any more simplistic messaging online than we were when we had three telly channels and the home's daily/Sunday newspaper to rely on. If we don't make use of what's available, it's our shortcoming - and as I said, not everyone has boundless time - not the Internet's.
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