#Misinformation#FactChecking#Disinformation#Propaganda#News#Media#Democracy: "If you think people are gullible, misinformation is rampant, and misinformation is the leading cause of troubling beliefs and behaviour in society, it makes sense to try to design interventions that teach people to be more paranoid about misinformation. However, if you think—as seems to be the case—that people are already highly suspicious of manipulation and low-quality misinformation is relatively rare in their information diet, you will realise there is a high chance such interventions will backfire, exacerbating problems of distrust that lie at the root of many profound epistemic problems in society.
It also illustrates why it is appropriate to hold misinformation researchers and misinformation interventions to very high standards. Even if expert classifications and research are not being used to censor, there is a risk that faulty and highly subjective assumptions will shape popular, well-funded interventions that either achieve little of value or worsen the problems they aim to fix."
#SocialMedia#Misinformation#Disinformation#FakeNews: "“Misinformation,” some say, is now just code for views one disagrees with. (Right-wing figures have harassed Donovan online and off, and accused her of perpetuating a “censorship-industrial complex.” Other researchers have faced even greater scrutiny, in the form of congressional subpoenas and public-records lawsuits.)
Quantifying the effect of misinformation is even harder than defining it. In the debate over why people fall for conspiracies, some scholars say that too much attention is paid to social media’s role and not enough to other factors, like government officials who make false claims on prime-time TV. Studies have failed to reliably find a direct causal relationship between viewing online misinformation and changing specific behaviors, such as switching voting positions. But to Donovan, Facebook’s ability to disseminate falsehoods at unprecedented scale has obvious consequences. When vigilantes take up arms in the wake of online rumors about “antifa” invaders, when people read on their feeds that vaccines are microchipped and voting is rigged, other members of the public — law-enforcement officials, doctors, journalists, election workers — spend time debunking and reassuring. “There are millions of resources lost to mitigating misinformation-at-scale, where the cost of doing nothing is even worse,” Donovan has written. She is among those advocating for “a public-interest internet,” one where social-media feeds would be required to contain “timely, relevant, and local” news curated by librarians."
〝Simply declaring that ‘facts are facts’ is not sufficient, particularly given that people’s processing of evidence and knowledge claims is to some extent determined by social factors. It is precisely because truth is not self-evident that malicious actors can easily create confusion.〞 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01587-3
Many #GenX & #Boomer men are Republicans & some are anti-vaxxers, but a few women boomers are largely responsible for spreading #misinformation:
A small group of committed “supersharers,” predominately older R women, were responsible for the vast majority of the #fakenews in the period looked at. They promoted & shared links to vaccine hesitancy & politics-flavored fake news. 2,107 reg. US voters accounted for spreading 80% of it during the 2020 election.
Two new studies published in the journal of Science this week offer a deeper insight into the spread of misinformation on social media, offering evidence that it not only changes minds, but that a small group of committed “supersharers” — predominately older Republican women — were responsible for the vast majority of the “fake news” in the period looked at.
The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well. @TechCrunch has more.
How much does misinformation affect the people who consume it? Researchers at MIT and Penn set out to analyze the impact of 13,000 headlines on vaccination intentions among roughly 233 million U.S.-based Facebook users. Read more from Science Alert, including what type of content had the biggest influence over vaccine hesitancy. https://flip.it/jbP52i #Science#Health#SocialMedia#Misinformation
"You're very keen on passing it on
You say: sooner we catch it, the sooner it's gone
Move along now, nothing to see
Back to normal, as quick as can be"