Shifting Attention To Accuracy Can Reduce Misinformation Online 93
Abstract of a new paper posted on Nature: In recent years, there has been a great deal of concern about the proliferation of false and misleading news on social media. Academics and practitioners alike have asked why people share such misinformation, and sought solutions to reduce the sharing of misinformation. Here, we attempt to address both of these questions. First, we find that the veracity of headlines has little effect on sharing intentions, despite having a large effect on judgments of accuracy. This dissociation suggests that sharing does not necessarily indicate belief. Nonetheless, most participants say it is important to share only accurate news. To shed light on this apparent contradiction, we carried out four survey experiments and a field experiment on Twitter; the results show that subtly shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people subsequently share. Together with additional computational analyses, these findings indicate that people often share misinformation because their attention is focused on factors other than accuracy -- and therefore they fail to implement a strongly held preference for accurate sharing. Our results challenge the popular claim that people value partisanship over accuracy, and provide evidence for scalable attention-based interventions that social media platforms could easily implement to counter misinformation online.
Accuracy? (Score:3)
Demand that, and transparency from the government, and problem solved. Official secrecy is the elephant in the room.
Steps One And Two (Score:5, Insightful)
Step one is accuracy from government. Step two is accuracy from mainstream news outlets. They have forgone accuracy in exchange for low latency and clickbait.
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Step two is accuracy from mainstream news outlets.
Just stop giving them so much credence, and money. The oversight of everything is upon us. Deferring and delegating the authority is fine when it works, but each and every problem, especially the chronic ones we are enduring (40 year reelections, etc.), always come back to us.
Re:Steps One And Two (Score:4, Insightful)
Step two is accuracy from mainstream news outlets.
How are we going to accomplish that?
They have forgone accuracy in exchange for low latency and clickbait.
Low-latency clickbait is cheap and profitable.
Quality journalism is expensive, has little demand, and leads to bankruptcy.
Re:Steps One And Two (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainstream really didn't do this until the smaller guys become deliberately political first, and the deliberately political low-latency click-bait. Starting back maybe with talk radio, where people figured out that loud, angry, and misinformed/lying voices could make a lot of money. People did not turn against mainstream media until they got angry that their incorrect view of the world was not being reflected - hey, how come the big three aren't angry about this fake story I heard on Limbaugh?? Then when Fox got into the game of being deliberately biased and abandoning all pretense of being fair and balanced that other mainstream news outlets decided that they should be biased as well.
"Push a political narrative" may or may not be right. Sometimes the truth is not politically convenient for the listener, and that's the problem. Today's audience demands that their news sources lie to them because the truth is inconvenient. Such as "climate change is real" or "Trump lost" or "coal is no longer economically viable". Q is just a response to an audience that demands fake news (I think Q was just a troll who realized he got in over his head when he was taken too seriously).
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Starting back maybe with talk radio, where people figured out that loud, angry, and misinformed/lying voices could make a lot of money.
It's actually quite a bit older older, starting with "news" to sell ads for so-called patent medicine [wikipedia.org]. See the "Fake news avant la lettre" paragraph of https://edri.org/our-work/endi... [edri.org]
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Right. Because Trump certainly told the Georgia SoS to "find the votes". Oh wait, he said no such thing, but in addition to the initial WaPo story, NBC, CBS, ABC, and the NYT all "confirmed" it with "anonymous sources".
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But he's on tape, we've all heard it. Here's a recording (it's CNN, so you'll just claim it's deep fake.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03... [cnn.com]
It's a long rambling insane call, Trump repeats every piece of unfounded rumor and theory out there. He even says "because that's what the rumor is" as if being a rumor was strong enough proof to change the election. Discredited claims being repeated. He doubts the integrity of people who investigated his claims and found nothing. He claims, amazingly, that he really
Re:Steps One And Two (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been thinking lately that a lot of the trouble getting actual facts about situations that happened is because nobody is actually doing investigative reporting anymore. Newspapers have fired their investigators (they can't afford them), and all we can do in the vacuum is to speculate. So now we have a high speculation/fact ratio, and there is no other option besides being silent.
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I've been thinking lately that a lot of the trouble getting actual facts about situations that happened is because nobody is actually doing investigative reporting anymore.
It's even worse than that. Papers aren't doing *basic* fact checking on regular articles. They are posting unverified rumors and hearsay. I know people who have been quoted in newspaper articles whom have never talked to a reporter in their life. It's moved from not doing investigative journalism, to not doing any kind of journalism at all.
Re: Steps One And Two (Score:2)
Good one, mate - Appreciate the insight.
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But... why? (Score:1, Insightful)
A lot of big tech companies are stressing the importance of "preventing misinformation".
Why? Why now?
We've had differing opinions since before the invention of the printing press. "Misinformation" is largely in the eye of the beholder. This is why we debate ideas, and encourage MORE communication - not squash all but approved information.
Sure, the big California tech companies are endorsing one political ideology, but this new focus is making them drift away from being a platform into being a publisher. T
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Only citizens can vote. No one in either mainstream party has suggested that non citizens can every vote. The difference is that one party wants MORE legal citizens to vote, and the other party wants LESS. Because on a popular vote, one party has the clear majority, and the other party thus wants to find ways to stay relevant longer.
It's irrelevant in the long run, both parties have a long history of splitting the voting population about equally. One or the other will shift a bit towards the center unti
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And if you're shifting attention to accuracy, you shouldn't say that "many" non-citizens vote illegally and then back it up with an article about 19 people in the 2016 presidential election. 19 out of 140 million votes is not "many"—it's a statistical blip. And since when does ICE have anything to do with voter fraud? Shouldn't that be the FEC? Seems like a big propaganda stunt designed to confirm the new president's conspiracy theory.
By your reasoning we could say that "most" republicans support frau
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That is not an article. That's a press release -- about 19 people being indicted for a single election. In a single grand jury seating. From a district containing slightly under 4 million people, according to post-2016 estimates,. Would you like a different set of 19 [abc11.com] from the same state, indicted for voting illegally in the same election? How many thousands of illegal votes by non-citizens do there have to be across the country before you care?
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The study does not show that their vote had an effect, it shows that it could potentially have had an effect. It shows that if their sample was roughly representative (and to put it in context that sample includes an estimated 8 non-eligible voters across the entire US in the 2010 election), and the level of non-eligible voters was towards the higher end of the likely distribution, then "A similar analysis reveals that there
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The arguments in defense of election fraud keep moving the goalposts. First it was "fraud doesn't happen". Then it was "there's no compelling evidence it happens". The it was "there's no compelling evidence fraud is widespread". Then it was "there's no compelling evidence it is widespread enough to make a difference". Now it seems to be "there's no compelling evidence illegal votes by non-citizens, separate from other forms of fraud, are widespread enough to make up the entire difference". What next?
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This sound far fetched. Note that your link show them as being caught doing this illegally. You are possibly trying to imply that Dems want this to be done legally, which is false. You are possibly also implying that there are many many more who are not caught, possibly even affecting election resutls, but there is no evidence for this. That fac taht people were caught illegally voting is good news since it means we're catching problems. It is a perennial complaint by losing candidates that there wer
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You realize that by definition there can NEVER be evidence for this. This is a bit like defining crime rate by arrests. For every time someone knows about the crime or arrests someone there are hundreds of times they get away with it.
You don't just get to assume the negative. This isn't some question of science where the negative is the simpler and de
Re:But... why? (Score:4, Insightful)
For federal elections, only citizens can vote legally, but many non-citizens vote illegally [ice.gov], and at least one study shows that their votes do have an effect [sciencedirect.com].
You gave us a link to a report of 19 people captured voting illegally. And then you used that to make the claim that "many non-citizens" vote illegally. This is the essence of "fake news", the taking of paragraphs and headlines from factual reports and present them to fabricate a false narrative.
That is such a puerile and asshole thing to do.
Re: But... why? (Score:2)
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False. In many places anyone with a drivers license can vote and in New Mexico, the gateway state for illegal immigration responsibility for issuing that identification is farmed out to hundreds of private companies. Setting that aside, one party wants MORE legal citizens to vote by making illegal immigrants into legal citizens, enablin
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Sure, the big California tech companies are endorsing one political ideology, but this new focus is making them drift away from being a platform into being a publisher. The laws and rules are different there, and I don't think they'll like it once they get reclassified.
They cannot help nor do they dictate which direction the winds of profit blow. All they do, is follow those winds, and ensure their shareholders remain happy. Greed does not care about long-term. It only cares about the next quarter.
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When you're big enough you manufacture consent and create demand through public relations techniques.
Saying they cannot help nor dictate the winds is like saying lobbyists and advertising don't exist and companies don't use their outsized influence to benefit themselves and nobody's ever behaved anti-competitively. They absolutely do put their thumb on the scale.
Re:But... why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, the big California tech companies are endorsing one political ideology
Which is only a problem when they aren't endorsing mine...
Re: But... why? (Score:1)
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*more irrational
and with more focus on "winning" rather than understanding, finding common ground, evaluating information neutrally etc.
this in itself has given rise to more corrupted "ends justify the means" logic (or lack thereof more accurately) and this only further erodes trust because it's so agenda driven
The study shows one way to improve that (Score:2)
> with more focus on "winning" rather than understanding, finding common ground, evaluating information neutrally etc.
The study shows one way to improve that situation, WITHOUT resorting to anything that resembles censorship.
Participates were asked to look at a headline and choose whether or not they thought that headline was likely true.
Over the next few days, those users shared fewer Tweets and articles from questionable, hyper-partisan sources. So it seems that asking people to rate whether one headl
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They simply reminded users of the idea of considering whether or not a headline is true. The users then apparently thought more carefully about accuracy in their future sharing behavior.
The effect of reminding people of seriousness in various forms is a well-known effect. After driving through a distance with automatic average speed monitoring, the speed did not rise back up to levels from before. Roman generals were reminded memento mori [classicalwisdom.com]. And Robert described a similar concept of "meat shaming" where members of a native tribe were consistently complaining about the quality of a hunted large animal to deter ego boost of the hunter in one of the episodes of the podcast Behind the bastards [behindthebastards.com].
Re:But... why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is, for most of my life, while you could always debate opinions, you couldn't really end up stuck in a debate about facts. Facts were facts, and everyone basically started a debate on equal footing regarding those facts. You may interpret what those facts mean to you and to society as a whole and come up with a different take, but the facts still exist in both your view and mine.
Contrast that with today and facts are now a matter of opinion and completely debatable. And that's no way to conduct a constructive debate. In effect we end up arguing my reality vs. your reality, and we can never get to the actual meat of a debate, which is deciding how the reality we exist in effects us, and how we address those effects. "Alternative facts," has become a rallying cry. And to one side, the "alternative facts" don't reflect reality. While to the other side, the facts as they exist don't reflect reality. And round and round we go with nary a moment to come to agreement or even disagreement in a somewhat amicable fashion.
While I don't think for a moment the big tech companies should be the ones stamping out "misinformation," as they decidedly have a huge bias, I do think we're at an impasse as a society when there's no bringing the sides together even to the point of agreeing on a baseline reality based on agreeable and/or known facts.
In the end, there is widespread misinformation right now, and it's been used to drive a wedge between people so effectively that we can no longer exist in the same reality. Something needs to be done to fix that, but it needs to start with education and learning critical thinking. I think the tack of tackling the misinformation by squashing it will have the opposite effect. It will make those that believe the misinformation double down and seek out alternative means of finding the information they agree with. And our realities will become further and further apart from one another.
Which will make world leaders all the more happy as a divided people are much easier to keep under control.
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The problem is, for most of my life, while you could always debate opinions, you couldn't really end up stuck in a debate about facts. Facts were facts, and everyone basically started a debate on equal footing regarding those facts.
It's because no one is interested in investigating the facts, so they don't get reported, and we can't build our opinions on them.
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I think if you're expecting critical thinking to not play a role in our lives before we get to higher education, we've already lost the game. Critical thinking needs to be a part of the curriculum at an early age, even if it's for simple concepts to begin with, or by the time you reach college you're already pre-programmed to just regurgitate "facts," and no amount of teaching can step around that in an 18+ year old.
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You seem to have adopted otherization against modern day social conservatives. It is common knowledge that if you are receiving emotional signals that show up as auras and fears that others feel, you are not really receiving them from outside yourself. Part of your mind is desperately trying to tell you that you have unresolved issues within yourself which are directly related to the possession of the traits you have projected onto others.
This otherization has been going on for years, I will bet, and it h
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You're not wrong.
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Well, when the most popular dictionary in the US just changed the definition of racism from the standard definition to "If they hold power over you its not racist to hate them for the color of their skin" I don't think the tech companies are going to do anything but dump FOOF onto the fire.
Re:But... why? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Misinformation" is largely in the eye of the beholder.
That's just it. It's not. There is one side that is very blatantly clinging to fringe media outlets and "personalizing" their news experience around a certain narrative. Before, we at least were all on the same page and could argue policy. This last election cycle we were arguing reality. That's like saying censorship is in the eye of the beholder.
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Well the problem really begins with CONgress and our Intelligence community. The intel community wants to be taken seriously when the warn us about "Russian disinformation" etc but I don't see any reason to believe them at all. They are literally professional liars after all and Congress and the Senate are completely complicit.
"In ordinary usage, lying usually connotes an intent to deceive. In this case, DNI Clapper could not have intended to deceive the Senate Intelligence Committee because the true answer to Senator Wydenâ(TM)s question was already known to Senator Wyden and to all the other members of the Committee (as noted the other day by ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt). Committee members could not have been misled by the DNIâ(TM)s response, and it makes no sense to say that he intended to mislead them."
If they want the public to take disinformation seriously and they want the government in general to have credibility with the public on any issues at all they should get out of the d
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Is that the "Trump colluded with Russia" narrative? The "Russia has blackmailed Trump with pee tapes" narrative? The "Trump said 'find the fraud'" narrative? The "smirking teen taunted Marine veteran" narrative? The "Brett Kavanaugh gang rape" narrative? The "police officer killed by unarmed insurrectionists bashing his head with a fire extinguisher" narrative?
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Re: But... why? (Score:2)
Because the US Gov't is threatening to regulate (Score:2)
Same thing happened to video games in the 90s. The industry got told: Fix it or we'll fix it for you.
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There's a meme that goes like this: People: All opinions are important. Their opinion: 3^2=6.
Yes, we have always had differing opinions, but some opinions are simply wrong. People don't like to hear this, but a large percentage of the population is too dumb to arrive at their own informed opinions on matters which are abstract or of great scale or complexity. These people have no choice but to follow other people's opinions and that's what they do. This is not about intelligent people disagreeing. This is a
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Since I discovered postmodernism, and the underlying concept of deconstruction, I have often wondered if this is not the root of many of the problems with our society today.
Both state that truth and meaning are not only irrelevant, but non-existent.
Add in the concept that what you do not say says more than what you do say, and you have really hit a dead end. What you do not say can and will be held against you! There is nowhere to go from there, other than 100% self interest at the expense of others, power
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Because misinformation is real, it is not relative, there really is truth. For exmaple, Trump lost an election that was run fairly and honestly. He lost the popular election twice in a row, as well as losing the electoral college once. That is the truth, it is not a lie, it is not a subjective truth, it does not rely upon alternative facts. And yet, some people refuse this reality and try to substitute there own where Democrats run child sex rings in pizza parlors. The truth is that the covid-19 vaccine
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This of course is why when accusations of fraud were put forward, the Democrats were able to get a bunch of the people whose job it is to uncover fraud in various systems to come on TV and state there was no fraud in the election. Wait, not a single person still practicing who worked in such fields was willing to do so. Instead The screamed about there being no fraud and no evidence(even though there were metric fucktons of circumstantial evidence and eyewitness accounts) and they had a UK youtube mathemeti
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That does not apply to objective facts.
And if it did, you'd be debating the correct spelling of "gullable" along with plenty of other false statements too.
Re: But... why? (Score:2)
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The attack on the Capitol was a watershed moment, but they have been saying this since before the Trump presidency.
scalable attention-based interventions (Score:2)
"Who will watch the watchmen?"
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Check out the article (Score:2)
You might find it interesting to check out the article.
Because it's basically the opposite of censorship.
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This is a fancy way of saying censorship. And, as usual, the problem is: who decides what is accurate.
If I'm understanding the summary correctly, that would be the individual who does, or doesn't as the case may be, share the post / headline / article / meme / etc. in question. i.e. not censorship at all.
I'm not even sure I'd call this self-censorship, as that would imply that someone decides not to espouse or post an original thought or idea, rather than simply choosing not to repost someone else's 'work'.
Personally I think I'd prefer this kind of intervention than banning the 'offending' material, or thos
Truth doesn't care about your bilge (Score:2)
Bilge like all of the currently visible comments on this story. But I'm a simpleminded Darwinian. Reality is going to win and the rest of it is going to be extinct. Current recommended reading is The Hype Machine for many explanations about how the bilge is propagated.
Demand forensic journalism (Score:1)
We can ignore all the BS narratives by demanding the evidence.
The whole Russia hacked the election accusations fell flat on their face when we got to see the memes, who discovered the hacking, and were able to work out that the people who discovered the 'hacking' were paying a PR company in Russia (could have chosen any country that had a facebook PR company to fit whatever narrative) to run the memes that were NOT related to the election at all (and hence tip off the PR company that something shady was goi
Accuracy of opinions? - Good luck (Score:3)
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It's not just opinion that is the issue. There is factual news or there, but it's cheap. There isn't much money to be made from news so little effort is put into research or getting answers to pertinent questions.
false and misleading news (Score:2)
Weasel words. (Score:1)
Again with the weasel words. Did you forget that there is no way to cheat logic gates? Tautologies? Empirical data? The scientific method? Fuck "authority" they're only for people who think gravity is a belief.
Missing the obvious (Score:2)
From TFS: "Academics and practitioners alike have asked why people share such misinformation..."
Share does not equal agree.
Oh ha ha. (Score:2)
So, when can we expect the mainstream media to stop creating bullshit stories with things like 'a source familiar with 's thinking', or 'a source in the same building'? Hell, even 'anomymous sources' are starting to look extremely suspect, because they give a news org the ability to make up anything they want.
We just saw it with that Washington Post article about the one Trump phonecall. Not the WaPo themselves, although I'm sure they have their own fabricated stories, but the fact that almost all the maj
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Saying (Score:2)
There is an old saying, from about a thousand years ago: "People tend to get the government that they deserve."
If "people" don't "straighten up and fly right" then they are not going to like the results. It happened to the French, it happend to the Germans and the Russians. It is going to happen to "us". (Whoever "us" happens to be, for you.)
Friedrich Nietzsche (Score:2)
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed" --Friedrich Nietzsche (b. 1844)