A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.
—attributed to various
1
The uneducated honestly belief that every conspiracy they read about on the internet is true .... of course, what they disagree with is, by definition, fake news ...
1
The results of this research are hardly surprising. Human behavior has not changed but the way we communicate. Gossip is as old as humanity and considered a mean of social bonding. Nobody who thinks about gossiping will be shocked to learn that juicy and anecdotal stories (the typical rumor) spread like wildfire. The news that the local community bank increased profits by 3% would hardly make it into the gossip cycle. Spreading gossip in the past required listening, processing information, reformatting it and then telling it again. There was a human touch to it that controlled the most outrageous news. We lost these control mechanisms using social media. Now you just have to get excited about the rumor, and quickly push “post” or retweet. Also our scope of rumor sources has expanded form local to global, and we have lost our ability of contextual verification.
We should restrict social media to communications with family, friends and colleagues about local and private news, or abandon it all together. What good has it really done?
3
"If we allow the world to be consumed by falsity, we are inviting catastrophe."
To be sure, but how do we stop that falsity, when camps unhappy with the reality they confront--biblical literalists, Randian libertarians, and so on--simply invent another universe and declare it ultimate truth. Their partisans pick it up and run rampant. If journalists attempt correction, they are then disseminating "fake news."
1
You say: "Twitter users who spread false stories had, on average, significantly fewer followers..." and "Perhaps the novelty of false stories attracts human attention..." It could be that those who spread false stories are lonely and seek attention through the surprise value of the false stories -- e.g., "I am the one who brought this to the attention of thousands" and such motivations. It could also be that lonely people have greater difficulty in judging reality accurately and are less able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood. We refine our skills of judgment through experience with diverse people and not through the rugged individualism, social enclaves, and information silos that we live in increasingly. The right wing's attacks on our teachers and our public education system could make this problem worse as critical thinking skills and science education go by the wayside. Educating children to value and pay attention to the truth is important in combating the disturbing trends on social media. But, first, we adults must value it ourselves -- not easy to do in the age of Fox News, Breitbart, Mercer money, Trump, and social media platforms.
1
Maybe Twitter could put the kabash on retweeted lies, by limiting the number of retweets allowed. I don't use Twitter, or Facebook, or any of those other seriously dangerous social media. Not enough time in my life to bother with that crapolla. There are other ways to communicate without exposure to lies and misinformation. We all have a responsibility to find the truth, for our own safety and welfare.
There is no personal cost to those who propagate false information. Embarrassment is no longer a deterrent, but being the harbinger of "some exciting news" has rewards, at least by those who do not care about the truth. People also have a very good cover, "I don't know, I saw it on Twitter" but are not concerned with the lack of checking the truthfulness of what they retweet.
The modus operandi seems to be "shoot first, ask questions later" in the line of being the "first to have broken the news" among the followers. As we, the people, talk about Narcissistic bent of politicians, we fail to look at the mirror!
This seem like how gossip is spread - a juicy story may be retold as if true, even if the originator is know to be a liar, because of the reasons the author states - including that the reteller feel s/he is in the know. And squelching a story makes one a fun-dampener, not a truth-facilitator. Then there's also "no smoke without fire" to perpetuate a lie - tell a lie, stir it around, and the existence of the lie becomes evidence of its truth. I hope these scholars can figure out some strategies for helping with this phenomenon, because social media lie-spreading can have such significant consequences.
Do the people who spread false stories know the difference between fact and fiction and, even more importantly, do they care? Social media platforms do not provide human contact and a sense of community. We refine our skills of judgment and moral sense through experience with diverse people and not through the rugged individualism, social enclaves, and information silos that we live in increasingly. Lonely people may have greater difficulty in judging reality accurately and may be less able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood. The right wing benefits from this dis-orientation and is not likely to stop it. Their attacks on our teachers and our public education system could make this problem worse as critical thinking skills and science education go by the wayside. Educating children to pay attention to and value the truth is important in combating these disturbing trends on social media. This is harder to do in the age of Fox News, Breitbart, Mercer money, Trump, and social media platforms.
Simple to advanced emotional maturity will preclude this behavior. Those with e-maturity understand to critically look at just bologna.
Too many Americans are emotionally immature until they already made their bed in a bad way and are looking for scapegoats to blame (resentment) instead of looking in the mirror. Resentment politics, a race to the bottom.
1
As many commenters point out, the propensity for people to spread lies, or at least exaggerations of speculative truths, is nothing new. We are indeed atracted to information that seems exciting and/or inciting.
So is this just another example of the current young generation coming of age, recognizing some eternal issue about humankind, and thinking they found something new? Even with "technology", which again each generation thinks is remarkably more impactful than what the old timers used before, I question the significance of this "new" reality. Cave people likely indulged in fake news as least as frequently as we do.
Given that those who spread false news more often “had on average significantly fewer followers, followed significantly less people, were significantly less active on Twitter” and so forth: could the promotion of false stories be decreased by an increased focus in our K-12 systems on how to be a smart consumer of news and of media in general?
Falsehoods were retweeted at a higher rate? Sometimes we do that when we are dumbfounded what is being said by humans who are assumed to be intelligent. It is not that we agree with what is being retweeted. Sounds like to much credence was given to prove a thesis. How do humans discern fact from unanalyzed observation? The more we communicate with each other,especially not like minded people ,the closer we come to a logical consensus. It is the idiotic question that pollsters often ask people, do you think think are going in the right direction or wrong direction. Stupid question ,because nothing goes completely our way.
Are we all in such an electronic stupor that an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can pretend with bated breath it is a studied, profound observation that, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand?"
Do we really need an M.I.T. marketing professor to to tell us the Category 5 hurricane coming onshore is alarming? Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies, knowingly or unknowingly, as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T., and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back. With interest !
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. As long as people buy it, others will continue to sell it.
1
A generation ago, when email first became pervasive, there were threads that spread wild and crazy stories ("Did you hear...", "Did you know..."), along with endless joke lists. Somehow we outgrew those.
We know by now not to trust everything you read online. You have to be discriminating about what kinds of medical information you trust. Where you get your news. What sites you post your profile on and whom you choose to network with.
Twitter is something else, for all the reasons cited in this article. The potential for chaos is horrifying. For example, the director Spike Lee tweeted the wrong address for a man who killed another man, inciting Lee's own followers to threaten the couple who actually lived at that address. Another tweet that was only up for a few minutes claimed the White House had been bombed, followed by the stock market taking a temporary dive. This is scary stuff.
Perhaps, like those stupid email chains, we will outgrow Twitter. However, there will be something to replace it.
The solution is for people to be as discriminating with Twitter and all social as they are with other aspects of their lives.
1
After decades of research, I came to the conclusion that people who believe lies are stupid. And those that spread them are morally bankrupt.
Of course, it still needs to be peer-reviewed...
One's View ( aka perspective, understanding, etc) is the peep-hole through which people conceptualize their own universe. A person's view influences and grooms their "identity", People are entrapped by past experience, conditioning (aka brainwashing). People see what they wish to see, hear what they wish to hear. The bachelors & bachelorettes always prefer to hear the lies. Truth is painful. Lies spread easily.
Rejecting facts & evidence and falling back on accepted beliefs is the normal behavior for the majority of humanity. Even scientists have a hard time accepting the evidence in front of them - that's the "Paradigm Shift" challenge pointed out by Thomas Kuhn. Luckily, occasionally someone like Alexander Flemming kept looking at the Penicillin in the dish and stopped throwing them out.
The great teacher Gautama Buddha from India pointed out some 2,500 years ago that the path to insight starts with the cultivation of "Right View". Where there is "Right View" there is "Wrong View". The Buddha declared that there is not a trace of evidence for a Creator God, instead, everything is a process of "Cause & Effect". Americans are very religious. The big lie of Creationism will be around forever, as well as evolution and climate change denials.
2
This is important research into human behavior and is an important start.We used to live in a world where one could say,"Have you heard any gossip lately?"and the response would be a whisper about some compromising or salacious information.The purveyor would juice up the story to make it more intriguing.Now the "gossip" is spread rapidly to thousands and passed off as real news.Either the tech companies need new algorithms to identify the source of stories or we have to become a lot more skeptical and discerning.Skeptical and discerning is unlikely to happen.
It seems to me that a fundamental flaw in this study is the assumption that the Twitterverse is in any way a truly representative sample of anything other than itself, and that it indeed functions as a universal template for how news travels in the media in general and/or between and among individuals.
I don't spend much time on Twitter, but when I have observed the platform, it appears that in addition to celebrity-types who "must" have a presence there, Twitter largely attracts a certain type of individual, one who is not terribly well informed and who is more interested in being a source of information to others and/or creating a Tweet that gets re-Tweeted than in any kind of substantive thinking or action.
Of course, the character limit of Tweets isn't meant to foster deep discussion, but the tone of remarks nevertheless suggests a gestalt that isn't exactly intellectual or indicative of persons who do a great deal of reading or thinking.
I admit that my observations are empirical at best, but as reported by Sinan Atral, the study itself fails to establish any basis for assuming that the dissemination of news by Twitter represents how news travels in the rest of the media and/or the world at large.
I thus find the study to be of little true value, other than as it relates specifically to Twitter, for whatever that's worth.
2
Those who are indoctrinated into alt-right principles distrust our institutions and cannot separate fact from emotion, so it's very easy for them to believe fake news. If they read one article in The Times, for example, that calls their beliefs into question, they will not read another one. The source automatically becomes "Fake News." This is why Trump only goes on Fox News. People want to read and see news that verifies their existing beliefs. It's so easy for fake news to spread when the population is indoctrinated. Evangelicals, I've noticed, are more inclined to share the most outrageous information, and I think that's a topic worth researching.
I am a librarian - media literacy is something I spend a great deal of time teaching. During 2016, a fellow librarian, whom I grew up admiring, began sharing the most slanderous stories about Hillary on Facebook. They were obviously false. When she shared one about Hillary having an affair with Yoko Ono, that was the last straw for me. I had to hide her feed because it upset me so much. I can understand someone who isn't trained as a librarian not knowing the difference between real and fake news, but it's just totally inexcusable from a librarian. It's amazing to me what indoctrination can do to otherwise-educated people.
6
This essay again points up the need to have a legal definition of the term "news," and to require reporters and distributors of "news" to meet licensed standards of journalism which incorporate truth-telling as a bedrock principle. If doctors can get Board Certified and accountants can get CPA's, why shouldn't we insist upon a similar type of credential for members of the news media? And if social media outlets cannot control the accuracy of the content they distribute, they should never be allowed to call it "news."
2
I remember the excitement many felt at the advent of the internet. This would be a boom for democracy whereby facts and truth would magnify the best of of our American life and punctuate the virtues of our society. Little did we anticipate the depths to which we would sink with truth and facts competing with the darkness of disinformation led by our political leaders and those of wish to extinguish our great way of life. Snake oil salesmen are taking over the world.
1
Are we all in such an electronic stupor that an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can pretend it is a studied, profound observation that, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand?"
Do we really need an M.I.T. marketing professor to to tell us the Category 5 hurricane coming onshore is alarming? Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies, knowingly or unknowingly, as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T., and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back. With interest !
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. As long as people buy it, others will continue to sell it.
3
These false memes almost seem believable. One claims bullying leads to 4,400 youth suicides annually. The CDC is cited as a source. Gun advocates use it to shift focus from assault weapons. The CDC makes no such claim, but that doesn’t matter. Even when you point out the falsehood and cite the actual CDC analysis, it doesn’t change a thing. The response will be defensive and the effort to research the truth feels like a wasted effort. I need to reread Scott Peck’s work on the nature of evil.
1
Even before any electronic communication Jonathan Swift noted in 1723 that "falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after."
9
I need to see the context within which the fake news spreads. Sometimes I see people sharing fake news with an accompanying comment on their outrage. How frequent are those?
1
Perhaps it would be less surprising that lie-spreaders on Twitter had fewer followers and were on Twitter for less time than truth-spreaders if one takes into account that lie-spreading as a political activity often involves a coordinated attack that includes not just the post, but also engaging temporary "e-mercenaries" to diffuse those lies online. These e-mercenaries will, of course, be less involved, and with fewer long-time followers / followees than regular Twitts.
1
Attributed to Mark Twain:
"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
4
Did the researchers attempt to discern if the false stories were believed by those who shared them? Maybe people know they are false and they tweet them because they are amusing.
Since when was Twitter ever intended to be a branch of the Fourth Estate? Since when did anyone ever consider that what they see on Twitter is true or even has a likelihood of being true? I can't even be sarcastic on these comment boards without several people condemning me for making an unsavory remark that they take literally.
Did the researchers compare a given popular lie on Twitter with how it was treated by the so-called mainstream,"legitimate" press. For example, the brouhaha in regard to Michael Brown and "Hands Up! Don't shoot!" The mainstream press repeated the many lies about that situation and did not make much of an effort to correct those untruths, even after they knew better. I suppose you will want to sweep that little incident under the rug and hope everyone will forget about it since it represents just one example of the massive failure of the American press to report the truth to its readers (consumers). You'll go on and create these frivolous studies about a gossip app and how they spread lies to distract the loyal readers from the real problem.
1
Sensational headlines always sell -- now with social media everybody gets to add to the sale.
3
How about dis-enabling the "share" buttons or functions?
"“Falsehood,” says one, “flies, and truth comes limping after it.” If a lie be believed sometimes only for an hour, it has accomplished its purpose, and there is no further occasion for it."
That was offered without attribution in a Boston newspaper in 1808. There were many versions before. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
It is interesting to see numbers for this, a scientific beginning. However, to get hard numbers for something known for centuries is only a beginning. A good an useful beginning to apply science to the issue, I'm not denigrating this, but still just the beginning of what we need.
Now we need to get numbers and hard data on what lies underneath, on the human (since it isn't bots) behavior that is producing this effect.
Understand it more before applying censorship as a "cure." That would only give liars a new lever to manipulate. Imagine if we get the truth banned in favor of what turns out to be a lie. It could happen, because "accepted truth" has been overturned more than a few times in our past.
"scientists have yet to fully understand"
The internet and lies are no different than the "whispering game" we played as kids. Remember? The first student would have a phrase or sentence, then whisper it to another student and they would whisper to another until each student had a chance. The last student would regurgitate something that was not close to the original. The internet simply has a classroom of billions and an infinite number of bots. Don't need no scientific method to understand children.
1
"We started by identifying thousands of true and false stories, using information from six independent fact-checking organizations, including Snopes, PolitiFact and Factcheck.org."
All left wing "fact" checkers that draw no distinction between opinion and fact.
3
Which could also be interpreted as there's no such thing as a right wing "fact-checker," since they believe in all those "alternative facts," right?
1
Several times on Facebook I've seen "news" about the death of a famous Hollywood star that was totally false. Pure click bait, but venomous in character, and not even political. I think the most costly news our society has ever had is the so-called "free" Internet news.
4
For sure, death is the only thing that can be definitively determined to be either true or false. Unless of course one comes across a resurrection. Let the bots chew on that one for awhile.
I think one needs to be careful about the notion that truth is so easily determined. I frequently see assertions about our various wars and interventions and friends and enemies in the Middle East which are at best dubious and these appear in mainstream respectable sources. One should expect this. I don’t expect fully accurate accounts of our wars to appear in mainstream sources til long after the war is over and only then if it no longer matters much. We went to war in Iraq in part due to propaganda and it is naive to think that the press is that much more trustworthy now. On a smaller scale the same is true of domestic politics. I recently saw a summary of an interview in a very reputable source and it gave a very misleading impression— I had seen the interview on YouTube. The fact that one can’t necessarily trust the mainstream “ respectable” press is partly what gives an opening to alternate sources, which of course in some cases are worse.
The interview, by the way, was with Jordan Peterson (spelling might be wrong). I am not a fan, but the summary in another news outlet didn’t accurately convey what happened in the interview. He made his interviewer look foolish. But this Other Liberal Outlet couldn’t admit that conservatives were right in thinking he had done well. Some conservatives in turn thought this victory over a liberal interviewer meant that their hero was right about everything.
4
What would have passed censors about WMD in Iraq, or about the Tonkin Gulf Incident?
4
Donald, you realize that what you're describing is your interpretation of someone else's interpretation of a subjective event ("doing well" and "victory" in an interview, whatever that last would even mean)... there's no question of fact anywhere in there. If you want to argue that some source isn't reliable, you should bring a far less squishy example.
Typically, only the Allmighty knows whether something is true or false; the rest of us have to rely on accumulating credible evidence to support our opinions, which have some probability of being true. We have an ethical and civil responsibility to do so, as to do otherwise can hurt people.
So let's say 97% of the evidence supports climate change as real and man-influenced; 99% that tax cuts increase deficits; 85% that deregulation/failure to regulate banking was the most important cause of the 2008 crisis; 90% that immigration is a net economic win for the U.S. but hurts a small group of people; 75% that income inequality also slows economic growth as the rich tend to save rather than spend; 90% that Trump's ACA sabotage has contributed to more people without health insurance and therefore higher mortality.
The people that believe the preponderance of the evidence are called Liberals or Democrats; those that want to believe fairy tales are called Republicans.
1
Until a few minutes ago I'd always thought Mark Twain said, "A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." That turned out to be a lie, but the old proverb still makes the point that the preference for deceptions that trigger dopamine are much preferred by the many (because they confirm biases) over facts that threaten dopamine flow (because they destroy biases) is nothing new.
Give researchers enough time and they'll "discover" that the only thing animals (including humans) care about is maintaining dopamine flow. The only reason this isn't already common knowledge is because it's so incredibly dopamine repellent while the patently false deception about free will is so dopamine appealing.
It's funny (strangely) how a famous phrase in this context can be false. I found on politifact, (sorry Churchill fans): One version [of the Churchill misquote] is attributed to English clergyman Thomas Francklin. "Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn," he wrote in a 1787 sermon.
I think a key point here missed in the story, is that lies are designed,
and designed to effect.
Truth is often simply revealed or presented.
4
First, the article in The Atlantic. Now this. The established media would like to think of themselves as truth-tellers. What they really want is to protect their fast eroding credibility which they have squandered in their biased news coverage and in their antipathy for Trump who has successfully used the social media to get around them. As Bush 45 once remarked to an obviously taken aback Matt Lauer in an otherwise unmemorable interview, "You don't matter so much anymore." The truth is hard to take.
2
The best way to spread lies on line is to exploit the inaction of a do nothing government.
Thanks to Reagan and Chairman Birch in the 80s, the FCC is little more than a paper tiger. When we have had opportunity to stop propaganda on our public airwaves, we did nothing. Look at where we are now!
As for the internet, the White House and GOP leadership won't lift a finger when cyber stalkers spread lies that change the outcomes of political elections.
If you want to make sure Americans are lied to 24/7, do nothing.
A French proverb says, "When lies take the elevator, the truth has to take the stairs."
How about requiring bots and non-human mechanical sources to self-identify at the beginning of the communication, so we know its not a person expressing themselves, but a message someone wants to spread.
Automated messages of any kind are inherently deceptive, when they create the appearance of live interaction.
My suggestion is to teach our children which news outlets practice traditional journalistic standards, and which do not.
The idea of finding the truth always involves some amount of trust.
I can't verify the validity of stories in the New York Times, but I trust their journalistic ethic and therefore the information.
Before social media we had the National Enquirer, but most people seemed to know not to trust that source. Social media is more difficult because it contains personal communication and outrageous lies mixed together.
1
A hypothesis about why false stories are retweeted more than true ones: if someone sees an item that seems plausible and unsurprising, then they think their friends are probably going to see it anyway, independently of what they do. However, if they see something astonishing, then they think maybe this is inside information, not something coming in over all the regular channels, and they can make a difference to their friends' knowledge.
5
Might be. I'd like to see someone design a scientific test of that idea. And of more ideas. We need to understand this better.
2
I was fortunate to have an excellent social studies teacher in high school during the seventies. He drilled critical thinking concepts into our adolescent brains, such as understanding logical fallacies. Similar curriculum needs to be mandated to equip kids with the mental tools to combat today’s digital torrent of misinformation. A comprehensive and diverse education remains humankind’s best hope for long term survival and prosperity.
11
Are we all in such an electronic stupor that an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can pretend it is a studied, profound observation that, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand?"
Do we really need an M.I.T. marketing professor to to tell us the Category 5 hurricane coming onshore is alarming? Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies, knowingly or unknowingly, as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T., and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back. With interest !
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. As long as people buy it, others will continue to sell it.
11
Are we all in such an electronic stupor that an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can pretend it is a studied, profound observation that, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand?"
Do we really need an M.I.T. marketing professor to to tell us the Category 5 hurricane coming onshore is alarming? Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies, knowingly or unknowingly, as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T., and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back. With interest !
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. As long as people buy it, others will continue to sell it.
1
Gut feelings and common sense intuition do not examine questions with the scientific method. So, yes questions to which we think we know the answers to need to be examined.
Snake oil is relatively harmless, kills a few, here or there, at its worst. What you fail to realize is is that lies are much worse, they undermine the very foundations of the scientific method which is responsible for the advances that humanity have achieved since the Renaissance . Truth is reproducible, can be tested, and we encouraged it to be tested, because the more testing truths endure, the stronger they become.
What we are really experiencing is an intense adverse reaction to 600 years of progress, without an alternate argument. This has happened in the past on numerous occasions, they called themselves Luddites in the recent past. What do we call them today “Bannons”
?
There is one glaring problem with this study: the selection bias inherent in their sample pool of Twitter users. The universe of Twitter users is hardly representative of most news consumers. The very fact that someone has signed up for this platform is indicative of their need for “scoop” (i.e. the newest, latest ‘insider’ story). They crave getting the news, or the gossip and rumors, firsthand, ASAP, ahead of the pack. Certainly this is true for the press and the political class. But most Americans are not so obsessed (both the good news and the bad). As a result, the study’s conclusions, while valid for Twitter, are not generalizable to the broader population.
1
The internet is a research tool for people with few research skills. For them it's like a shopping trip. Once they find the information that satisfies their prejudices they are satisfied and feel validated in their opinions. By feeding from what is little more than a rumor mill they are easy marks for Russian propagandists.
3
Folks raised on advertising only know exaggeration and bait and switch. They become cynical while still kids. They're concept of "the truth" is basically whatever you can get away with. Capitalism created the market for untruth and capitalism created Facebook. Who's going to stop it now?
1
Didn’ Virgil say it better:
Immediately, Rumor goes through the great cities of Libya,
Rumor, an evil which no other is faster:
She (Rumor) grows stronger with movement and acquires strength by being passed on,
small at first due to fear, but soon she raises her head
and enters in the wind, and walks among the clouds.
Mother Earth, irritated with the anger of the gods,
gave birth to her, as a sister for Coeus and Enceladus,
quick on her feet and swift on her wings,
a terrible monster, huge, who for every feather there is on her body,
there are that many watchful eyes below (wondrous to tell), that many languages, that many mouths talking, and that many ears hearing below.
At night she flies in the middle of the sky and through the shadow of the land
screeching, nor does she close her eyes for sweet sleep;
in the daylight she sits as guardian on the peak of the highest roof,
or on high towers, and she terrifies great cities,
as much grasping onto the false and depraved as she is a messenger of truth.
7
Lies are easy. Either you make it up or you take something somebody else worked on, with backup, and simply reverse its meaning.
On climate, every time I come up with a good argument, I've noticed it takes a day or two (or less) for someone to simply reverse its meaning and turn it against me.
Hard work is a liability when it comes to spreading the word.
It is easier to destroy than to build, but rebuilding - that's the real problem The destruction of civil society will bring humanity to a halt if we don't learn to work together. "God" won't help us if we work against each other.
3
I used climate as an example because I've been observing the fake arguments for a dozen years or more. And what I said was too much about me. I meant, any good argument is turned against evidence, the truth, science, intelligent understand, etc. etc., not just against me.
1
Conundrum. The author is a professor at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology's business school. Yet he thinks billion dollar companies like Facebook and Twitter are going to voluntarily turn down profits in exchange for truth and avoiding catastrophe? Please.
In case Professor Aral doesn't know the history of these companies, *Google* (another billion dollar firm) tobacco companies. Big Oil. Big Pharma. Big Food. Monsanto. Plastics. A zillion industry association groups that lobby our politicians anytime a bill is proposed that might improve public health and the environment but lower their profits, because heaven forfend they might only make a billion dollars in profit every year instead of every week or month- and that profit is after the executives have gotten their obscene salaries and stock options.
I know these MIT folks are generally geniuses in math, but I'd love to sit down for a game of poker with this author. Jokers are wild!
1
let's be sure to keep an eye out for future research on this matter, meanwhile, just keep up with your favorite print and broadcast media...lots of "dissemination" there.
The mal-educated, misinformed, and misled can't resist the guilty-pleasure-temptation of spreading "news!" that others would miss, but that only the perpetrator "knows something" that other sources won't report. Conspiracies are the stock in trade. Notice, similarly how breathlessly these perpetrators speak, instead of quietly speaking reproducible evidence (facts are already in danger by scoundrels). A juicy story is far better than the droning of the Principal over the school's loudspeakers. Add nowadays social media.
4
Great article and "labeling" as in food might make sense, but the the underlying hypothesis is that greater proliferation equals credibility and while that might be true I'm not sure your research addresses that issue.
Paul
Carefully crafted algorithms can be crafted to play to people's political bias, to confirm previously held and embedded beliefs. Advertisers do it with some frequency. People love a good story: we've had a love affair with various fictions for a long time. The spread of fake news probably parallels the history of printing--and real news--modern social media are a near-perfect substrate to spread stories widely and rapidly.
Hence part of the explanation for our gullibility is that we have always been like this--whether being played by the guy in the White House, Russian trolls, or Orson Wells on the radio. Fake news has been around for much longer than the real thing: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/fake-news-history-long-v... ("The Long and Brutal History of Fake News," posted 18 Dec 2016).
This begs the question whether we can control popular impulses that demand stories that allow us to suspend disbelief, impulses that enjoy confirmation for personal views. It is not clear that any science can win this battle. Maybe the law can help, in some circumstances, but it is hard to be too optimistic.
I think a basic flaw of human nature is to believe and assume the worst - regardless if it's true or not.
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FWIW, I was raised in the Lutheran Church and “confirmed” just over a half century ago. One thing during the confirmation experience stood out and stuck with me.
The translation of Luther’s Small Catechism we used contained the King James Bible version of the 10 Commandments, followed by the question “What does this mean?”, followed by a restatement of the gist of the commandment.
But for “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” the catechism added a gloss: Don’t lie, “and put the best construction on everything.”
Lutheranism has its problems. One wishes Luther would have followed his own advice later when it came to antisemitism. Perhaps an overemphasis on getting one’s creed “just right” and faith in what that will bring is a signature problem of the tribe into which I was born.
But if one is in the Upper Midwest discussing insurance reform, other ways we cooperate in society, or our habit of assuming the worst about others, one might consider bringing a little Lutheran sensibility to bear. A political movement that can’t successfully defend Obamacare in Wisconsin or make dairy farmers feel like they and their way of life are valued is doing something wrong.
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More proof that social media in the hands of people who coast through life without interest in discernment is a tool that becomes an insideous weapon that undermines right thought, behaviors and direct actions and relationships, communities, governments,
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You guys should take a look at Facebook, next.
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Maybe lies spread more effectively offline too. The problem ain't Twitter; it's us.
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"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on." (Note that this quote is often, and ironically, misattributed to Winston Churchill!)
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Churchill probably repeated it often. The man was dealing with the output of Hitler and Goebbels, and their concept of The Big Lie. He may have popularized it for a generation.
I find it strange this piece doesn’t give even a passing summary of the bot algorithm and why they haven’t come to the conclusion that these “humans” spreading lies are actually meat puppets in a troll farm. It almost reads like the core purpose is to float the idea of automated censorship of some kind.
Though the "mechanics" of spreading 'true-lies' are not same as in Orwell's "1984", the results are the same. Truth becomes lie and v. vsa.
Anyone who has ever served in the military can tell all one needs to know about rumors true or fake.
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I pursued a similar proposition and was invited by New Directions in the Humanities at Penn as “The Academic Ramp-up to Fake News: ”academic fraud as a double-standard; undergrad plagiarism is expelled yet collegiality shields professionals.
T.S. Eliot's Norton lecture “Taste” cadged Shelley’s “Defence” as in “there is a certain order or rhythm mimetic, an approxiation to this called taste,” Eliot dramatically reversed: “The ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence [ . . . ] I find his ideas repellent [“The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,” 1933. Eliot’s methodology was Prigozhin troll factory authoritarian academic coup. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton Press's warhorse, cribs ‘theory of modes’ from Peacock’s “Four Ages of Poetry” eliding it from the index. My 2010 “Forensics of a Straw-man Pharmakos,” Int’l J.Knowl, Culture Change Mgt. Vol.10, No.3 133-144. precedes “Academic Ramp-up” deconstructing Frye’s and Eliot’s oligarchics as a Plato “expel the poets” ruse. Strikingly, Common Ground withdrew my invitation.
The “legs” of Eliot’s trolling of Shelley show in a decision against an undergrad for plagiarism at Princeton using Shelley’s “Defence”:
To paraphrase the poet, "the child is mother to the woman." We believe that the lesson here should be learned by Napolitano and borne for the rest of her life. [Napolitano v. Princeton Univ. Regents, 186 N.J. Super. 548 (1982) 453 A.2d 263]
Maybe we should call for a voluntary blackout on all social media three months before every election.
What has it come to when an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can say as a 'profound observation', "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand."
Do we really need an M.I.T. marketing professor to to tell us the Category 5 hurricane coming onshore is alarming? Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies, knowingly or unknowingly, as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T., and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back. With interest !
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. As long as people buy it, others will continue to sell it.
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As for me, I like to make decisions based on the quantifiable. This looks to me like an excellent area for data gathering.
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I wonder if the apparent skewage of false-vs-true items might come partially from the tendency that I and many of my friends have, to e-mail each other with real "doozies" to show how screwy the Internet it.
If you spread false stories face to face, what happens? Well, you lose friends you actually need to get through everyday life; you might alienate family members; you might lose your job. What do you lose if you spread them using an alias on line? ... ... ... I can't think of anything either. With no control over social networks, you can yell "Fire!" when there is none, lots of people can be adversely affected, and nothing happens to you. This isn't rocket science, as they say. When social networks were set up, did their originators believe only truth-telling people would use them? If so, I'd like them to believe that I sell "invisibility dust" at $10.00 a half ounce too.
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Unfortunately, the people who set up these click-driven platforms are making a bundle!
How about an automated system which, after the fact, analyses true and false story propagation (based on multiple fact-checking groups) and generates stats and ratings for reposters? Users accumulate ratings that are associated with their online identities. I hope Facebook and Twitter are looking at such schemes.
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“When social networks were set up, did their originators believe only truth-telling people would use them?” More than 30 years in the industry tells me that, unfortunately, the answer is essentially “yes.” You could drop the word ‘social’ from your query as well, and it would be equally true. Many of the technologies we may presume were developed through years of careful design and deliberation, simply weren’t – these more often sprang out of necessity, or just convenience, and went from the lab environment to general use without much consideration for bad actors. A typical home network is just fine for family members and guests, but doesn’t scale for global use, and the inevitability of misuse/abuse. Yet a very similar approach has been taken with far too many technologies, which serve as the basis for our interconnected world. As you point out, there is no deterrence for bad behavior, and the prevailing mindset is opposed to any, for fear of infringement on the openness of the Internet. As in all things, I find some degree of balance is appropriate, but our current lack of such leans closer to anarchy, with predictable results. Most people are honest and act with good intent, but to presume that all will be, offering no contingency for those who aren’t, is beyond naïve.
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So what does that say about the #metoo and #timesup movements? They are based on the misconception that once you stand accused, you're guilty. Lies are often spread with sprinkles of truth thown in, yet the public is supposed to accept it all as fact, as truth. People are jumping on to this movement train just like sheep are herded around by their shepherds often over a cliff. It's alright for sheep to behave that way but not humans. It says somehting about our intelligence or lack of thereof.
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Who decides whether a story is "false"? An outfit like PolitiFact? Come on. Most of the "fact-checking" going on is opinion journalism masquerading as some sort of objective truth-finding.
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- and there it is. People invested in truth finding are smeared as political hacks, so finally, there is no truth. Did Trump say women “let you grab them... when you are a star” or something like that? Even though we “have a tape” with his voice, and witnesses to his statement, who can say with certainty what the actual words were? I see sloppy quotes all the time, and many are tweaked ever so slightly, with an “and” instead of an “or” , or a “was” instead of “is”, and the result has a completely different or even opposite meaning. And in a case like the Comey meeting with Trump, even though Comey says he made notes immediately after the ask for loyalty that he rebuffed, even though his history of truth telling and honorable behavior is well documented, whereas Trumps prodigious lying is certainly without equal - people who want to believe Trump simply will.
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I wonder if "spread" is the right term for what can be a retweet with commentary that is in fact an argumetm not an endorsement. Many of my retweets with commentary are debunking, arguing, mocking, handwringing, or outright indignant raging. The most effective way to expose a false story is to reweet with commentary. Asking again: Are these algorithms documenting the true nature and purpose of every tweet "spreading" the false stories? @katharine_weber
The purveyors of false information learned from the marketing professionals. There is a fine line between puffing a product, be it food, movies or travel destinations, and telling an outright lie cloaked in pretty language. False claims and stories disseminated via social networks are the natural evolution of little white lies from clever people who know how to boost viewer numbers which they measure through "likes" and "retweets" and their progeny. Fox News obviously knows the drill and it is no surprise that those connected to the Kremlin understand and use this to our detriment. Twitter, Facebook and those similarly situated: Heal Thyself.
Don't wring your hands and feel self-righteous about this. If you argue with reality, reality always wins.
Spread your own lies to counter their lies. It's called counter-terrorism.
Progressives and Democrats need to do this better than the fascists. Study the methods of propaganda and learn how to make a lie believable with details and specifics. Coordinate multiple supporting in-depth attacks. Follow-up with follow-on lies. Monitor results and calibrate.
Amplify their deepest fears and worst imaginings. Target their insecurities.
Take the fight to the fascists and flood their websites. Target both Russia and China.
Use false flags to turn the fascists against each other and work with their paranoia. Spread distrust through their ranks kick them when they're at a tipping point.
The way a boxer knocks you out is with a flurry of punches from every different direction. Do the same to the alt-right fascists.
And get rid of all the old Democrats that are not 100% on board.
I have to think that would hasten our descent into chaos. The only way to fight lies is with the truth. Otherwise we devolve to “I know you are, but what am I” name calling , and no one ever changes their mind. We must not sink to that level, we must reward stringent research and fact checking - that’s how you beat propaganda. We have done it in pharmaceutical ads, where the required list of possible side effects at the end of commercials takes so long, we forget the original claims for the drugs benefits - I see that as a good thing. We did it with cigarettes, we got lead out of gasoline and paint and water pipes, by careful research and public awareness. We can do it with political ads as well if we want to. One place to start: eliminate attack ads altogether, and fine the candidate if a PAC puts out a false claim for them or against their opponents. This is the Information Age, and we need to harness it like the steam engine or the electric dynamo.
A lie will go around the world while the truth is getting its boots on. This is nothing new.
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However to stop the timeless--and fun--innuendo and rumor "news" format?
Perhaps a department of "Newspeak" might stop this, right? Must be an "only-the-facts-mam" internet algorithm out there somewhere.
But then there's the problem of "over-the-fence" police that will be needed if internet "lies" are thwarted by the authorities. Or perhaps a law against uttering "untruths" with fines and jail time--sort of an updated Salem witch trial legal system without the fire and water?
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"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"
Old wisdom with a new twist.
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Twitter is a grand massive social network where all kind of people believing in different ideology share and interact.As a usual practice it is dominated by people believing rightist,fascist ideology.Leftists, radicals tweeting limited to reactions. As a matter of fact Twitter too is polarised between rulers & ruled.The believers of staus quo are numerically superior and the radicals, lefts cannot match them.In India the Hindutva forces are swarming in social media.Any criticism to them or the present Govt. or the Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi pounced and trolled.The retweeting swells in leaps and bound to break the twitter.In that case the propagator of democracy, human rights are least defended.It seems there is too vigilantism in social networks and many fear to tweet.This feeling of being followed in Twitter is a bad signal of freedom of expression.
What has it come to when an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can say as some kind of profound observation, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand." Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T. and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. And as long as people buy it, others will sell it.
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Welcome to small town USA! Though this Phenominom is as old as man. Go to any small town and if you say something about someone it will spread from person to person. the WIlder and Juicier the rumor the faster and more prolific the rumor will spread. It is not only Twitter, or Facebook, It isn't Left or right, Nor is it anything else other than human nature.
The lies spreading online are the same as lies spreading through your neighborhood. People talk and if they think they have dirt on someone they are going to spread it. Are you going to be able to stop it? No
We have dealt with political smear campaigns all the way back to the first groups of men were first getting together. I am sure Tonda was spreading lies about Atouk. So in reality, if you want to study and find out how lies spread you don't need to watch Twitter it is just a big huge group of people. GO to a small town in the Texas Panhandle and you will hear all the gossip or lies you wish.
I don't subscribe to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any of these social networking platforms. They're overrated and somehow seem shallow to me. I do read newspapers and watch cable television but the thing that works the best for me as it applies to understanding the world is reading books on history, politics, economics and social activity in different cultures.
I find that the review of what took place in the past provides a clear picture and understanding of how we got to where we are now and why. In most cases events that took place decades ago are impacting us all now so the comments on these social media platforms are really just uninformed people talking about things they don't understand or parroting someone else's thoughts or positions and they're usually also uninformed.
I believe the entire social media communications platforms are pretty useless and don't contribute much to learning or understanding.
But that's just me. Those of you who spend time on social media can knock yourselves out and stay stupid. It's still a free country. For now.
"Disturbingly, we found that false stories spread significantly more than did true ones."
Not sure why anyone would find those results "disturbing" much less surprising for most people tend to believe the worst about someone or something than not. Maybe it's because a false story appears more interesting than a true one.
All I know is the date listed for my grandmother's death is not only incorrect, but three different dates (all incorrect) appeared in three different sites. The only way I knew the real date was because of my mother's stories about her when I was young as well as seeing the headstone and obtaining a copy of the death certificate.
If I can't trust websites to list my own grandmother's date of death correctly, I rarely believe anything on the web 100% any more. There are mistakes and blunders and then there is the intentional misleading of information for a plethora of reasons, many of which to cause harm. Just because a story appeared on the Internet does not make it true.
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News that is sensational and out of the ordinary attracts us and in turn, we tend to want to share this with others. Fake news can be extremely sensational and far from ordinary since it can be based on made up details, hence we are more attracted to the fake stories over boring, fact grounded, true stories. Sizzle sells and it always will!
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It's really quite simple: most folks don't know ANYTHING about what makes their "devices" operate. They are willfully stupid. So anything that's read online or comes out of a phone or the internet has to be true, right? Twitter? FB? Tremendous violations of privacy. Always were, always will be. Targeted ads? Isn't it amazing how they know just what site you've been to in a matter of seconds? Folks don't have a clue as to what goes on without their knowledge in the background. Advertisers and kapitalists love it. You're being duped and you don't even know it!
SERIOUSLY No mention of Trump and the ENDLESS lies, the Alex Jones Info wars that go beyond insane diatribes, Glenn Beck world, Fox News and the countless right wing blogs that go on and on promoting anything that goes against science and rational thought. Oh! Did I fail to mention all those horrible untruthful major news networks that are so false and fake in their forever need to go down the middle on all topics political and otherwise. They're the REAL fake news right folks!
Coming from a rural state, one term came immediately to mind re: social media's spreading of lies and innuendos.
Manure spreader.
Yes, manure can be a good fertilizer. But it also poisons lakes and streams, and it sure does stink.
I spend a lot of time online debunking junk that Facebook friends post. It's caused more than one argument, as folks really seem to resent having their posts exposed as false. It makes no difference if friends are liberal or conservative. I do this in hope of training them to do the fact checking themselves. Sadly, when I asked one friend why she didn't take the 2 or 3 minutes to check out whether something is true or false, before sharing the post, she said "why should I, when I know you'll do it for me?"
Is this research dodging a key question? Namely: do lies spread faster and further on one side of the political divide? I have the hunch that this is the case. After all, fans of Fox News seem to love fake news...
I view the findings as being exactly what would have been expected. As many have pointed out Mark Twain pointed this out 100 years ago, with regard to the lie traveling far faster than the truth. At the same time, what is more important to determine is, "does a tweet change minds?" Just because a tweet is widespread does not necessarily mean it is widely accepted as truth. We shouldn't equate quantity with quality. I see tweets all the time, that I don't believe. Most from the WH. I am sure these are widely spread, but polls don't indicate people believe them or are swayed in their opinion by them. I believe the study we need, is one that takes this research deeper to determine the relationship between the quantity of the tweets and the actual influence that are having. The lies are always told in a more salacious way than the truth. The truth can be boring, where the lie creates its own energy by challenging general beliefs. But is it believed by people who are not already pre-disposed to the false beliefs? I would be very interested in some evaluation of how effective this activity is in changing minds. I will wait for evidence, but my common sense tells me the conversion rate is extremely low.
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I don’t favor false news, but I have confidence I can separate true from false in most cases. I consciously avoid being a consumer of so-called “social media.” I avoid engaging with those who subscribe to Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The most troubling concept in this piece, however, is the author’s suggestion of “behavioral intervention”, applied to grade news as true or false in the same manner as a can of beans is labeled for nutritional purposes. Who decides if an article is true or false? Who labels? Is the “truth” of everything always so easy to determine?
In case the author hasn’t noticed, labeling food hasn’t slowed obesity.
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With the combination of 'bot' driven falsehoods and regular user driven ones a couple of questions need to be also addressed. For example, do false twitter driven stories occur in geographic clumps in any different ways than true ones do? And then there is the notion of whether falsehoods have greater gossip values that people always seem to crave? Obviously in 'political' themes good news about people who have greater popularity may also be in demand. Did the authors take these themes into account, or were the analysis of just the mechanics of true-false and bots vs real people the only criteria that was studied?
The upcoming midterm elections will be more closely scrutinized for all of these factors. And since this is newer territory that has a direct affect on voters' attitudes and behaviors how does the future become shaped by this phenomena?
Finally then as far this study and discussion are concerned, there is the other shoe drop of 'fake followers' to consider. The larger the numbers seem to be on any Twitter and Facebook accounts the more encouraged people become to blindly jump on board. We know that attitudes and beliefs, once established in a person's mind trying to point out a false notion is like removing concrete.
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As Winston Churchill once said, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Now, in the age of Twitter, he'd have to amend that: "A lie can circle the globe before the truth can fall out of bed."
Twitter and other social media are made for the urban myth. It used to take years for the story of the guy found in a tub of ice in a foreign hotel, sans his kidney, to make the rounds, Now you can spread it light speed.
No one wants to share sensible analysis of trade and climate, or stories that break down factually the impact of an upcoming bill. You re-tweet because you are intrigued, outraged, awed, or just blown away by the supreme kittenhood of the message.
Lately I have had a coupon from Kohls offering $75 off the first $80 spent (not real) and a photo of a Seattle Seahawk player dancing and burning a flag (he really danced, someone photoshopped the flag in.) Neither poster checked Snopes first, and if you'd google the subject, both times, the fact that it was a hoax popped up in the first few links,
We need an education campaign, some sort of "Only You Can Prevent Jackassery" message that instructs people to think before they share.
“A lie will travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”
"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it"
Jonathan Swift, 1710
This phenomenon is not unique to the age we live in. Jonathan Swift observed in 1710 that, "...as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…"
Mark Twain's observation over a hundred years ago, "A lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get it's shoes on," seems relevant to this article. This phenomenon is explained by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf when he says ,succinctly, that the more enormous the lie, the more likely people are to believe it,since they cannot imagine themselves telling a lie of such magnitude, they cannot conceive someone else doing so. Also pertinent,is my observation that people are willing to believe an obvious lie so long as it supports their prejudices.
A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
Mark Twain and many others
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Winston Churchill
Just occurred to me. In addition to my comments below, in a way this is an example of a major communications organization, the NYT, spreading fake news. That somehow the Twitter and Facebook started the fake news thing when, in fact, this has been going on for centuries.
According to the report, this study analyzed only Twitter activity to draw its conclusions. Questions: Does Twitter, by its nature, encourage invention and spread of false stories? Does Twitter, by its nature, attract individuals who are more likely than average to create and spread gossip? While the study seems to have been carefully constructed and executed with respect to Twitter, can the results be extrapolated to social media in general or human communication in general?
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"Disturbingly, we found that false stories spread significantly more than did true ones. Our findings were published on Thursday in the journal Science."
The entire scenario regarding how trump won the seat of president and remains to have the support of many boggles my mind. Through my years I have develop the habit of questioning words and opinions I read and hear. I am a critical thinker and use Occam's Razor as my point of reference. I am open to coming up on the incorrect side of an issue, and must admit my ego must tamed. Not always easy.
I wondered as well how 'false stories spread significantly more than true ones". I did some digging and came across a term coined by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, "the backfire effect" which sites;
"some individuals when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs come to hold their original position even more strongly".
It was an ah-ha moment for me.
How lies are spread on line is not the question. The challenge is awakening, teaching, and supporting the imperative art of critical thinking.
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Precisely and while the Russians and others have meddled in our politics and news feeds, it is a lack of critical thinking and a bias to believe the stories that support your particular point of view that are the heart of the problem.
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For a basic understanding of Critical Thinking , read John Corcoran's introduction to critical thinking .
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"Surprisingly, Twitter users who spread false stories had, on average, significantly fewer followers, followed significantly fewer people, were significantly less active on Twitter, were verified as genuine by Twitter significantly less often and had been on Twitter for significantly less time than were Twitter users who spread true stories. "
SURPRISINGLY? That's what I would have expected. None of the people I follow on Twitter are spreading false stories and most of them have many followers, have been on Twitter for at least a year, and are verified.
From Newsweek:
"On Facebook, they found that "extreme hard-right" conservatives shared more fake news stories than all other political groups combined, while on Twitter, Trump supporters consumed the most fake news."
http://www.newsweek.com/liberals-dont-share-believe-fake-news-much-right...
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Of course, because the right wing needs stories that support their alternate facts universe and reaffirm belief in such howlers as Hillary was running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria in D.C. or "The Russia story is fake news."
Not surprised that false stories move faster. Real stories/real life has to conform to boring old truth. False stories have no such constraints.
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Cognitive bias toward a position acts as an accelerant for tweets. An experienced disinformation operator - comrade, take a bow - will seed a false report via bot or live imposter among many real accounts that have indicated vulnerability toward a certain position. Give it an underlying emotional kick to amplify anger, anxiety, fear or other attribute, and off it goes. It's neither hard to do nor expensive when disinformation operators are paying the rouble equivalent of the US minimum wage.
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It was Mark Twain who said a Lie is halfway around the world before the Truth's got its shoes on. Apparently, he was exactly right.
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Amusingly, the attribution of that wonderful quote to Twain is likely false.
See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
In other words, this is what happens to, in effect, public (though highly disseminated) broadcasting in a totally unregulated environment. Cf. Whitney Phillips's 'This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things,' MIT Press 2016.
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“ A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Attributed (weakly) to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and others, but certainly to the point.
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Mr. Clemens knew this well over a hundred years ago: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
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There is something spectacularly wrong with having so much information at your fingertips and it becomes more apparent all time.
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To paraphrase Mark Twain - A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its running shoes on. And that was said 130 years ago. Today, a lie gets around the world in a nanosecond. Ah, progress...
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Given the importance of the topic, every effort should be made to ferret out the lies and counteract them.
And a leader of a country affected so much by fake news ought to encourage its citizens to educate themselves. Certainly, a good leader would not try to do the opposite and instead smear the fact-based media. Hmmm.
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Wise old saying: A lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has its boots on.
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Actually, this is not new.
The major literary figure Jonathan Swift wrote on this topic in “The Examiner” in 1710 although he did not mention shoes or boots:
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…
The quote that more people have heard is:
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
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Some years ago (the exact time is lost to history) I came up with my own formulation for the phenomenon outlined in the op-ed: rumor is more important than fact, lies are more powerful than truth. False stories inspire people: "See there! That proves how corrupt the ________ (fill in the blank) are. I knew it all along."
There's a another big factor. Much of the public is ignorant and content to stay that way. What I mean (hold your outrage, please) is that most people don't possess or have the ability to recall enough factual information to counter the false stories. Into this blank space big lies crawl and find a home.
Gathering facts takes time. Being able to fully assimilate and use factual information takes thought and effort. Who has the time for all of that work? So many other things to do.
The most fundamental problem is that we adapt a political orientation BEFORE we gather facts to back it up. It is not a single process but a series of actions, with the first step, usually, assuming the general beliefs we find around us and then looking for proof.
I have a cousin, a lifelong resident of Texas, who previously would forward a few of the mountains of false stuff that would flow through her emails. In almost every case, there were clear clues in the items about falsity, but if you wanted to believe it, without checking or thinking about it, you could.
News items that might counter one's world view make for discomfort. Confirming what you believe? Priceless.
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Neuroscience and brain imaging demonstrate that we "feel" before we "think" which is why facts don't matter to most people. We adopt our worldview and defend against facts that disturb it. We hate dissonance. Unless an emotionally significant personal experience (fear or pain) disrupts our worldview (a crisis in health, job, family, etc.) we stick to our guns so to speak. I'm hoping that enough Trump supporters eventually feel enough pain to step back and recommit to a more fact-based world.
It's common for news that produces outrage to get more clicks than news that doesn't produce outrage. It's human nature. This is the reason Rush Limbaugh makes in excess of $50,000,000/year for his inflammatory words. People love outrage and he is a master at producing it.
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Thanks for a comment that's "a case in point." What's your source re Mr. Limbaugh's income? I tend to believe that he makes way more than he's worth to anyone, but $50mill? That's a lot of income. Maybe once or twice, but since the withdrawl of key advertisers, i dunno. Sounds like a "half-truth" moving way too far too fast.
Rush makes $50,000,00/year? Really? I wondered. That's an enormous amount and thus immediately suspect as an accurate fact. Is it a lie?
So what do I do to check? I use the library research tools I learned in high school, now transferred to the internet. I look for multiple credible sources with a reputation for fact checking. First, I contemplate whether the NY Times, which has a great reputation for fact checking, has the time and resources to vet all letters in the comments section. Perhaps not, so I do a quick search on the NY Times website and find articles that confirm the numbers. Then I did a quick Google search taking care to look for credible sources with reliable reputations and history. CNN Money and Forbes also confirm these stupendously large numbers. A serious skeptic could look at the possibility that a personality like Rush could falsify the numbers, but at a certain point I must trust that these financial journalists in reputable publications have verified the information.
We have failed to explain the fundamentals of journalistic standards, and of critical thinking practices to whole swaths of the American public. They have no idea how to evaluate information coming there way. In my opinion, public gullibility is the scariest and most dangerous part of the Trump era.
2
Finally some good news. New communications technology requires research to provide best outcomes.
Learn that grad school--"best outcomes", like having "closure"?
1
Well, this phenomenon isn't exactly new. Mark Twain said "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes." The only difference is that with today's light-speed communications, a lie can go all the way around the world, then take side trips to the moon and Mars, before the truth finishes its latte.
1
It has been know for some time that conservatives have different personality traits that liberals.
And the conservative personality trait is much less likely to let facts get in the way in what they want to believe. Do an Internet search on "conservatives believe fake news".
This is from one of many articles you can find:
"Despite occasional left forays into reality denial, conservatives are far more likely to accept misinformation and outright lies."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/11/why_con...
17
So we need to take advantage of that fact.
A very excellent explanation of the issue - Michel de Montaigne: Essay I:9 ("On Liars")
Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. ... If a lie, like truth, had only one face we could be on better terms, for certainty would be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits. The Pythagoreans make good to be definite and finite; evil they make indefinite and infinite."
11
Here is a story I conjured up earlier today : I raised the question whether Trump was under the influence of Stormy Daniels as well as Putin .
Can the author of this article tell me how many now believe this and how many don’t ?
1
oooh, good one....i'm inclined to believe this, so i think i will.
Mark Twain said famously: "A lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on." The article would seem to verify this maximum. The web might potentiate the rapid spread of lies but the tendency is certainly not new. Makes one wonder how lies spread in Twain's day; word of mouth?
11
"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it."
Jonathon Swift in The Examiner, November 9th, 1710.
Nothing changes.
23
Perhaps, as with guns, Internet participation should be preceded by a serious registration process, so that only identifiable, real people can post. Then if methods exist for determining whether stories are false, individuals who pass on multiple false stories can be warned and, if the warning is ignored, possibly lose their license to post on a particular site for a period of time. They can also be exposed as someone untrustworthy when it comes to news items.
Social Media channels are identical to politicians: They always lie. Starting with that assumption, it's phenomenally easy to ignore them. Sadly, Sinan Aral, Soroush Vosoughi, and Deb Roy have no idea how to do that. This lack of intelligence to simply assume that Social Media channels are lying to you is going to prove a problem for their future.
1
We have really blown the opportunities for honest, open and easy communications on social media enabled by the internet. Facebook has turned into a confusing whirligig where people are spied on and prosecuted; Twitter is a junk pile of misleading information. We could have done so much better than this, just another capitalist tool trying to take advantage of peoples needs for connection with one another.
1
An example would help greatly. I suspect one explanation might be sensationalism (not novelty). If I tweeted to all my friends "gee, nice day to today, clear weather inforecast," I might not get any attention. If I tweeted, "OMG, tornadoes in the forecast," I suspect that people might retweet that.
Similarly, someone on social media might say -- "Eagles won the SB." Big deal -- who cares? Now if they tweeted "NFL has reviewed SB film and determined Eagles cheated & have awarded game to NE." Now that might get retweeted.
And are retweets without comment? In other words,whether on twitter or some other SM site(or should I say S&M) someone might retweet but say --- "this guy's crazy."
And you seem to infer people recognized whether a tweet was true or false. But did they? What if a perfectly plausible piece of information (false though i turned out later) was tweeted -- "Iran is receiving funding from Russia to build missiles." Later we find out it's false, (maybe) but who knew? I mean the NFL ref says it was a catch. True -- until further review.
And -- were the false vs true tweets objectively verifiable? Or were opinions embedded? Things that are true at a high level (women get paid 77% of men) -- can be show to be false with digging deeper -- controlling for job type, location, level, industry, experience -- that gender based pay differences evaporate. So if someone tweeted something like that, was it considered true or false?
Those of us inclined to pin this exclusively on Trump or the craven Republican Party that has made itself his handmaiden, must be honest with ourselves. Before Trump, before Fox, before Reagan, there was the intellectual revolution of the 1960s that brought us post-modernism, textual deconstruction and the wholesale dismissal of the idea of objective truth or the idea that there is such a thing as "right and wrong." To a meaningful extent we created the conditions in which this sort of "through the looking glass" un-reality could flourish. It is now up to us to re-establish the primacy of reason where sufficient information is available for it to be exercised even where the answers to which it leads us may not be to our liking - enlightenment now, as Stephen Pinker might say. The Dark Side has seized upon the very tools we've handed them, and we must have the courage to follow the evidence wherever it might lead - and where there is insufficient evidence but only where there is insufficient evidence, to respect those who find answers elsewhere.
15
Evidence suggests that anger, resentment and fear are powerful behavioral motivators, more so than contentment, trust and generosity. False stories, especially if originated deliberately as false, are likely to be anchored in malice. These stories will attract the attention and redistribution of greater numbers of re-tweeters than truthful tales.
Elections offer a good analogue. That's why cynical politicians have become so expert at stoking anger, fear and resentment. This is the best way to deflect by creating scapegoats. Social media is an excellent 21st Century tool for getting this done.
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I don't understand why people think this is something new, the spreading of false/misleading information. This has been going on for, literally, centuries. The only thing that has changed is the vehicle.
Prior to the Internet era of communications widespread dissemination of fake news was difficult and expensive. Sure, anyone could claim anything but putting out there for the masses is a different matter. There were three basic venues available, verbal (word of mouth), print, and electronic (TV and radio).
Word of mouth is easy, low cost, but has limited impact. Print has a greater potential impact but is much more expensive. You could print and distribute your own, which is costly or get it published, which is also expensive, but is paid for by sales and advertising. Electronic is even more expensive given the investment needed. On top of that the later two had a thorough vetting system built in which minimized the accidental dispersion of fake news.
In the Internet communications era the electronic vector grew significantly while, at the same time, dropping significantly in costs. And this happened long before Facebook and Twitter. Add to that the self-published nature of the communications. Anyone can post to usenet and forums. Very little if any vetting going on.
It's annoying how these authors claim to have done original work when there is little of that.
1
"If it's on the Internet, it has to be true, right?" The oral tradition of storytelling harking back to the dawn of human origins invariably has people "embroidering," modifying, altering, twisting or "finessing" what they hear and then what they tell others. Transmitting information on the Internet has obviously amplified this process significantly, including the spreading of misinformation, outright lies and deceits.
1
Unfortunately the people reading this story are probably least likely to be spreading false ones on Twitter.
How can we maintain optimism about society when the most informed are the least trusted?
How can we maintain optimism when technology outpaces the social fabric that binds is together?
What happens when fake video technology puts the final nail in truth’s coffin?
Cyberpunk dystopia has gone from sci-fi to reality in the blink of an eye.
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The ability to alter photos and videos should make people skeptical of what they see, which is not entirely a bad thing. Seeing is not believing. Skepticism is a sign of intelligence.
One of the best ways to counter such tactics is to improve public education to "arm" all people with critical thinking and historical knowledge, so they are less easily manipulated. Now one begins to understand why, along with the war on the lower classes, the rich and powerful (who also have a vested interest in lie-spreading) always attack public education as well. Keeping people as ignorant as possible is a longtime "good policy" for puppet-masters and slave-holders.
1
That Twitter is one of the most powerful and effective ways to spread misinformation is on Twitter. What are they doing about this? Don’t they have the power to stop this? If they don’t put an end to this, someone needs to invent a Twitter alternative that responsible people can use, and leave Twitter in the dustbin of history.
Another million dollar study to tell us what most of us consider to be common sense.
The way of the modern world.
A scientific study has revealed that lies, fake news, spreads farther, faster and more broadly online, or at least on twitter, than the truth?
This does not disturb me as much as the study's observation that the reason could be the novelty of the false news, that false news inspires surprise, while the truth is correlated with joy and trust. Truth is correlated with joy and trust? Really? The truth makes people happy and trustful and the only reason they would depart from such, embrace the false, is the novelty of it? Tell that to thousands of novelists, philosophers, scientists who have struggled to present the truth and been met with intense hostility. Which is to say it's at least arguable that the truth causes sadness, anxiety, that the human race has always had to struggle to embrace truth, to grow up, face the facts and increasing complexity of truth in existence.
In fact we can argue that the reason why falsity spreads so much more rapidly than truth on a site such as twitter is not so much because of the novelty of the false but because people who think truth is associated with joy and trust in the first place are people not really made for truth, that they are people with no deep inroad into truth and are swayed by any false report because they are emotionally and intellectually shallow in the first place, moving from joy and trust in only tidbits of truth to surprise at novelty of the false.
Those anchored in tragedy of truth find the false merely a curiosity.
1
The promise and peril of social media is that everyone is free to speak his or her truth—and as he or she wishes to present it.
Maybe look at your ideas about novelty and surprise from a different angle.
Those ideas suggest to me that the unexpected success Trump and Sanders enjoyed was due in part to their departure from the usual poll tested and focus group tested bromides. Trump and Sanders seemed to have tapped more directly themselves into the prevailing narratives and worldview of their intended audiences while caring less about giving offense. Trump’s audience was fed to the teeth with PC and Sanders’ audience wasn’t going to scare at words like “socialism,” so they were both protected from the usual “gotcha” game while benefiting greatly from the relatively fresh sound of their message.
It’s a hypothesis. But it doesn’t get us to where we can talk about true and false. I posit they were still tapping into the prevailing narratives and worldview of their audiences. Narratives help us learn, and worldviews provide a framework, but we must reason and look at the facts as best we can to sort out what’s probably true.
If y’all can come up with a useful algorithm, fine. But I’d promote widely the idea that if someone keeps pressing your buttons and telling you what you want to hear they’re probably up to no good and trying to manipulate you.
38
"Sanders’s audience wasn’t going to scare at words like 'socialism'" Quite true, though many of them were only too quick to use "capitalism" as a term of derision. Even Nancy Pelosi was backed into a corner: "Are you a capitalist?" But what did they mean by this word, or didn't they know?
"'Capitalism' is in most of its uses a term of Newspeak. It suggests a comprehensive theory to explain our society, and a strategy to replace it. But there is no such theory, and no such strategy. We know this from a very simple observation, namely that, after all social transformations, however fundamental, after all adaptations, achieved with whatever effort and at whatever cost, the term 'capitalism' still surfaces as a description of the result." -- Roger Scruton, "Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands"
There was an element of Rubicon-crossing in both Sanders and Trump, but "going there" wasn't brave; rather, it was boring. Nothing they said was stimulating, novel, necessary. Sanders, as is his wont, railed against bankers, corporations, and the like, but at the end of the day, his policies were not too radical but too stale. Fresh ideas are welcome, but leftist shibboleths and nativist populism don't count.
In times of economic and physical insecurity, demagogues rise. This is not new. Some of us want this to cease, however, which means we have to deal with the problems that allowed their voices to rise in the first place. Count me unimpressed by their willingness to drift beyond boundaries.
1
Consistent with your idea that Sanders was tapping into prevailing views is the fact that his campaign (I was a volunteer) proceeded according to well-worn organizational procedure. There wasn't much room for innovation. All that was different was the shift in political sensibilities which, while not entirely trivial, was also not fact-based nor immune from demagoguery. For example globalization was neither purely good nor purely evil, Bernie. Some American workers suffer, others benefit. And the impact overseas is also mixed. Yes the world is complicated.
It's time to progress toward increasing focus on facts and intelligent, honest deliberation. Not so farfetched. After all what's unrealistic at one moment in time becomes conventional before long. The ideas of elections or aircraft or heart surgery were once in the realm of wildly unrealistic!
1
Having interacted with people spreading falsehoods online, and fruitlessly tried to disabuse them of these notions, I agree wih the idea that these folks have an insatiable desire to feel more "in the know." They tend to be less educated, and hence have a chip on their shoulder intellectually. What could be more empowering than thinking you know something that the eggheaded "elites" can't or won't understand? It's a strange sort of tribal ignorance, rooted in pathology.
False stories invariably involve some slander on an individual or group, or are thinly veiled attempts to prop up an ideology. They seem to always tap into base emotions like anger and hatred.
It boggles my mind that people can use platforms such as Twitter and Youtube to openly slander and malign, with complete immunity for the perpetrators and the social media companies. The Pizzagate story, which nearly ended in terrible violence, and the recent "crisis actor" accusations come to mind. Innocent people are put in the crosshairs and set up for potential harm, and yet they can't seek legal recourse? It's absurd.
Big Tech turned the connotation of the word "disrupt" on its head, on their way to untold riches and influence. It turns out the definition of the word never really changed.
Disrupt: "drastically alter or destroy the structure of something." More and more that something is starting to look like civil society.
3
Another possibility for the ubiquity of false stories online is that correct stories can be found easily from other sources, like newspapers, TV news, magazines, radio news stations, and other mainstream resources.
Since anything goes on the internet, it is a magnet for those seeking the real "fake news."
7
I like the idea of promoting/demoting or rating twitter users based on the proportion of fake news they spread. Find fake news that the three sources agree on, find out when they agreed on it, (i.e. the fact that it's fake was publicly known), and anyone who pushes the story after it loses a point (or whatever the rating system is).
It might be that the first 12 fake stories per year have no impact (one per month seems reasonable), since everyone is entitled to honest mistakes. But break that barrier, and your account gets some kind of a notation that travels with every tweet you post.
Or you could do it on a relative basis, regardless of the absolute number of fake news postings. bottom 10% versus top 10% in terms of honest posters.
I hope social media outlets will work on this.
1
I've noticed that people who spread these false things often don't care whether the particular item is true. They are more interested in expressing the general message they are trying to convey - welfare recipients are lazy, etc. A lot of talk about "tribalism" lately; maybe it's that.
One of the great founding myths of the internet is that it would make the world one by allowing not giant corporations or insincere governments to continue controlling the flow of information, but rather by facilitating well-meaning individuals with a natural thirst for truth to replace the artificial constraints on what people were reading with factual analysis.
In those bygone days of innocence and naiveté, we thought that we detected a new dawn that--post-Vietnam and, eventually, post-USSR--would drive away all the professional liars and the racism and xenophobia that inspired so many of them.
Well, we know the outcome of all those illusions. Perhaps if we hadn't been misled by our own intoxication with freedom of information at the beginning, we'd have been more vigilant in protecting our revolution from abusers.
But I doubt it. As a student of history, I can think of no revolution that didn't betray the benign intentions that it originally professed. It is generally believed that the American system was extraordinarily slow to degenerate to the level of Trump; a closer reading may suggest otherwise, revealing the Orange Man as conspicuous mostly for the openness of his cynicism.
All we can do at this point is to follow such examples as the MeToo movement and expose abuse of power however and whenever we can. We won't save the world from false façades and propaganda, but we may save our own souls.
2
Until I used a program to screen them, I got countless anti-Trump posts. Most were taken from legitimate media sources. Some were misleading, though not false. I commented on them and lost a friend who believes it is my obligation to be ever vigilant against Trump. Only a few were outright false and were sent by friends who sent me an annoying number of posts.
Why is anyone surprised? Humans don't think critically most of the time and a lot of our behavior and moods are controlled by hormone levels. Little wonder that a story on social media, particularly one that has a solid emotional core, finds itself repeated again-and-again...
As far as I'm concerned, social media is "for entertainment only."
For that matter most of what we call "news" is opinion. Why? because the actual "news" is pretty dry and simply factual. However, when news organizations invite opinions that boring news gets a bit more interesting and can even fire up those hormones.
Hence we have emotion packed, highly crafted language to present an opinion as fact and it maintains a continuous news-cycle that hashes and rehashes the same stories over and over again.
Of course, the news media in the USA has, from the beginning, often been highly questionable. There are no editors on the social media sites and that makes for highly questionable material that is, at best, only for entertainment. Unfortunately, a lot of people think what they read is truth because they want it to be true.
2
Thank you George. I really appreciate your "social media is 'for entertainment only.'"
I don't use Twitter, but it seems to me a flaw in the study that it seems to assume that retweeting implies agreement or belief.
1
What has it come to when an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can say as some kind of profound observation, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand." Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T. and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. And as long as people buy it, others will sell it.
1
What has it come to when an M.I.T. professor, Sinan Aral, can say as some kind of profound observation, "The spread of misinformation on social media is an alarming phenomenon that scientists have yet to fully understand." Do we really need an M.I.T. marketing professor to to tell us the hurricane about to land is alarming? Does it really take a "scientist" to understand that people lie, and that other people will happily spread the lies as long as those lies confirm what they already believe? If this represents the current standards of M.I.T., and I were a student there, I'd demand my tuition back. With interest !
Selling snake oil is one of humanity's oldest and most tried-and-true professions, and the internet is the best tool humans have yet devised to sell snake oil. As long as people buy it, others will continue to sell it.
1
"though it was disheartening to learn that humans are more responsible for the spread of false stories than previously thought, this finding also implies that behavioral interventions may succeed in stemming the tide of falsity"
Let's stop pretending there's nothing Silicon Valley can do to fix this.
1
This sounds like an impressive piece of research, confirmed by its publication in Science -- congratulations to the authors. However, it is disturbing, indeed. The stark and accurate conclusion is very frightening in our current world in which Trump spews falsehoods and lies numerous times each day, and neither his 30-40 million strong base, nor the majority of Republican Congresspeople, appear to have any concerns with this "world consumed by falsity." SAD!
Though a bit wonkish, I might suggest decision science as a place to find testable hypotheses. As people, startle/surprise represents novelty i.e. "worth noting". Threat (subtle and overt) will be more memorable. Confirmation bias will be at play. Sharing 'strategic' information regarding the state or intentions of 'agents' is elevating (if not a need of the righteous). Creating a cause/effect narrative will instill confidence despite a lack of evidence to support the connections between the asserted causes creating the effects.
The beauty of false news is that it is not bound to a truth that limits how many of these (and other) cognitive inclinations one can utilize whereas falsehoods can be constructed to embrace as many as one might want. Conspiracy theories are nice examples of narratives (the secret 'order' is producing negative consequences for you as they aggrandize themselves) that draw on agents (members of the 'order') whose strategic intentions (self aggrandizement) create consequences that are negative yet familiar so confirming. Who could resist such a piece of gossip?
"... false stories spread significantly farther, faster and more broadly than did true ones ...These effects were more pronounced for false political stories than for any other type of false news."
The pervasive reach of false news and counterfactual notions by and among Republicans may be confirmed by a casual perusal of almost any political comment thread on this site. That isn't a scientific analysis, of course. But neither is it entirely anecdotal. The authors do not mention what has been proven already elsewhere, namely, the Trump Republican monopolization of the use of conspiracy theories and other false news.
1
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain (and many others)
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
This is an ancient problem, not a new one, although the internet puts this human behavioral defect on steroids.
Human beings are variously stupid, naive, impressionable and highly vulnerable to mindless conspiracy theories.
Take Pizzagate, a purely fictitious, phony and fraudulent story about Hillary Clinton running a pedophile sex ring out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC.
The story was spread far and wide by fake news websites such as Infowarsand was promoted by alt-right psychopaths.
In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, fired three shots in the restaurant with an AR-15-style rifle as "self-investigated" the conspiracy theory. No one was injured.
In an interview with The New York Times, Welch later said that he regretted how he had handled the situation but did not dismiss the conspiracy theory, and rejected the description of it as "fake news".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
- Thomas Jefferson
Those promoting fake news are promoting anarchy and should be prosecuted for sedition.
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Socrates -- your Twain and Jefferson quotes provide remarkable support both your points and the authors' hypothesis. Truth is broccoli and lies are Cheetos.
Please pass the Cheetos.
2
Well stated!
"...the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." -Thoreau, the tech skeptic voice of our time.
21
Trump is the world's fastest lie spreader
No one does it faster or better,
And the number per week,
Makes the quashing more bleak,
All this from a non-paying debtor.
97
The Internet is analogous to our mental processes. We constantly are challenged to sort out, relative to what we've learned and what we are presently learning, what is true, likely to be true, likely to be untrue, and not true. Our condition is that of mental adolescence: we have virtually no self-awareness, our thought, except for occasional focus is amorphously random, Ditto for our intention, attention and we no affective power of conscience or objective reason. And the epistemological background for our mental take on things is inverted. not natural but, due to lack of information our forefathers invented the supernatural for us. But nature is relentless and is presenting us with the reconciling prospect of the reality of Process as purpose, rather than Object as identity.
9
Is this true or false or undecidable?