Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads False news spreads faster and reaches more people than the truth on Twitter and humans are more to blame than bots, according to a paper published in Science on Thursday. As social media giants come under closer scrutiny by governments worldwide hoping to clamp down on the negative political and social effects of fake news, …
"I tried to take the gullibility test, paid £100 to an online company for the privilege and all I got back was an email saying I passed. Still a bit confused to be honest."
Step this way sir! Please, mind your head on the hatch entrance, we wouldn't want to disturb that snazzy hairstyle, would we!
Have you considered a career in advertising?
I don't think it's primarily down to gullibility; it's more a split between prejudice and anarchy. Some news will simply support people's prejudices and biases but anarchy is also a strong and, I believe, growing factor; a lot of people are throwing a lot of spanners into whatever works they can find, not out of simple vandalism, but out of a growing dissatisfaction with how the world is being run.
Not sure why the down vote, I think you've hit the nail resoundingly on the head. From my viewpoint most of the reasons for UKIP, Brexit, Trump, Rightwing parties, et al is down to an opportunity to vent dissatisfaction rather than a real belief these respective paths are "correct".
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth
That article was beautifully ironic. It basically traced three centuries of misquotes, misattributions, and almost certain malattributions--of a quote about truth's disadvantage when combating lies.
I'm stunned by the researcher's restraint--he made no reference to this fact.
But Swift's discourse is not about the speed of transmission--he is talking about efficacy.
"Besides, 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..."
1710 November 2 to November 9, The Examiner, Number 15, (Article by Jonathan Swift), Quote Page 2, Column 1, Printed for John Morphew, near Stationers-Hall, London.
"If a Lie be believed only for an hour, it has done it's work." THAT is a quote that deserves prominent display in many offices. Unfortunately, most of them would cause me more dismay than satisfaction.
The thing I find with facebook is that people just share stuff believing it to be true.
Its the same shite that gets recycled over and over and people swallow it up...
Most of the time you can see that the story is bulshit, but even when you post a link to snopes or similar showing its full of shit, people afterwards don't read it and still share it...
but just for shits'n'giggles I like to post about the dangers of DHMO and watch the gullible share !!
"Most of the time you can see that the story is bulshit, but even when you post a link to snopes or similar showing its full of shit, people afterwards don't read it and still share it..."
My wife is on FB. She's given up telling people they are passing shit by proving them wrong. They either ignore, as you said, or block her. Some people really, really do not want their personal little bubbles to be burst by a pin prick of reality.
I think that for the average Faecebook user, they would rather believe the sensationalism of the hoax no matter if it's completely debunked, because the lie is more atttactive to them - it's the evolution of the popularity of the scummy tabloid/Mail/Guardian lies.
Sounds like your wife is not the typical Faecebook user and she should perhaps consider leaving them all to it and not looking at it.
Whatever you think you need Faecebook for, there's always a better way of doing it if you do it properly.
"My wife is on FB. She's given up telling people they are passing shit by proving them wrong. They either ignore, as you said, or block her. Some people really, really do not want their personal little bubbles to be burst by a pin prick of reality".
I gave up trying to explain things to some folks years ago. I got into so many flame wars that I deleted my original FB account and even had to "play dead" for a while to make some people go away.
What really annoyed me was people spreading fake AMBER alerts - and these were friends in the UK. I tried to warn them that the alerts they were passing were fake, not even asking "How would you feel if someone took a picture of YOUR daughter and slapped it on one of these alerts ?" got the point across.
Even if you point people to an original source, they still won't believe you - I've had to explain the "Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" hoax to several people over the years, and they still refuse to accept that they've been hoodwinked. Lesson NOT learned.
Who needs bots and AI when there's so much natural stupidity around ?
The odd thing is, I have always maintained that I can't choose what to believe, rather I am either convinced by the evidence or other persuasion, or I am not. That's not a choice.
David Nash,
Confirmation bias isn't a conscious process.
We all weight facts for reliability to some extent. And if you think the facts on the other side of the argument are less reliable, you're move likely to discount them. Unless you're spending serious time on trying to research something - in which case you're hopefully doing a lot more of your reasoning consciously.
So if I don't like some evidence, and it happens to be sourced from the Mail, the Torygraph, or increasingly, the Guardian - I'm much more likely to dismiss it with minimal consideration. Of course I should go and look up the provenance of said "facts", but life is short and so I often don't.
I'm willing to change my opinions, although I'm not perfect and so am rather more likely to wait a few weeks to do so, even if I'm convinced by someone in an argument. Who likes publicly admitting they're wrong? Although it's partly also that I try to be slow to take on opinions in the first place - and not go with my gut feeling - so at least I've got an excuse to be slow changing my mind.
Is that not the case for most people?
Maybe most in some cultures. In the west, there is a strong tradition of supporting positions by reference to established facts and logical structures. However, this is far from universally the case.
In many cultures, support for deference to authority is a much stronger. Often, in these cultures, age is a measure of authority. Hence statements by elderly (possibly orange and/or demented) gits trumps arguments by well informed young specialists.
Deference to authority is particularly strong when literacy is low, or where facts are complex - people unable to grasp complexity often refute its existence to defend their stance.
For Example, Boko Haram are militantly opposed to the very concept of rational argument (as in use guns against anybody presenting a rational argument). They are not alone. (We are 118)
I have always maintained that I can't choose what to believe, rather I am either convinced by the evidence or other persuasion, or I am not. That's not a choice.
To some extent, you're running up against the First-Person Restriction on Doxastic Explanation, which is a theory in doxastic philosophy (the philosophy of belief) which says that there's a limit on the extent to which you can logically question your own beliefs.
In simple terms, it's not logical for a sufficiently-powerful reasoner (any reflexive reasoner, really) to both believe P and believe that the belief in P has no relationship to P's truthfulness. (I'd write that out symbolically but it would be tough given the Reg's forum constraints and I doubt it'd help anyone anyway.) While you can entertain the idea that one of your beliefs is incorrect, if you truly believe that belief is completely arbitrary, you essentially hollow out the original belief. If you follow.
However: The word "choice" here is problematic for other reasons. One, of course, is that there is great disagreement on what "choice" is, as a quale (a mental experience) or as a physical event. Naive strict determinists would argue that there's ultimately no such thing as choice, and all your beliefs are predetermined.[1]
But there's no point in considering naive strict determinism[2], so let's assume it's wrong, and there is both physical choice and a quale of choice. As you posit, it would seem that your beliefs would appear to flow from some mental operation performed on various inputs, a process we gloss as persuasion. Are there aspects of choice there?
Many would argue there are. For example, there are qualia of making choices which come into play: choosing to yield to emotion or attempt to reason, for example; and how much effort to put into reasoning. Choosing to search for more information. Choosing to espouse a belief for social or political reasons, until you convince yourself of it. And so on.
Beyond that, many people would argue that there are choices happening beyond the phenomenological horizon - that you have conscious, reflexive access to only part of your thinking process, and what happens beyond there you do not know. You can call that "unconscious" or appeal to an emergent view of consciousness or whatever floats your boat, but there aren't many philosophers of mind or cognitive scientists or psychologists or whatnot who will tell you that you know everything that goes on in your noggin. So you may as well assume there are choices happening in the shadows.
Personally, while doxastic logic and philosophy of mind are fine ways to while away the idle hours, I think the more important issues are how persuasion happens in practice. And for that we should look to psychology and rhetoric. On the particular matter of social media, I'd suggest that even lay books such as Being Wrong, You are Not so Smart, and Trust Me, I'm Lying explain the results of this study quite adequately.
[1] Of course, if they're correct, then they have no choice but to argue that. And their opponents have no choice but to disagree.
[2] Even if a strictly-deterministic universe forces us to, in a strictly-deterministic universe there's no point to anything, because every outcome is predetermined.
On the face of it it, the observation that fake goes farther than non-fake says that the twats, at least in the aggregate, can and do know the difference, and treat the one differently than the other.
Being more inclined to pɹÉÊoÉ” snoɯʎuouÉ's point of view (how stupid the average person is, etc.), I wonder if they analyzed if there is a distinct subset of twats who are responsible for most of the fake re-tweets.
"On the face of it it, the observation that fake goes farther than non-fake says that the twats, at least in the aggregate, can and do know the difference, and treat the one differently than the other."
Naa, it's more likely that people will not only retweet something that reinforces their own prejudices, but that the fake stuff is more exciting than the real world, usually stuff they can vent their faux outrage at.
I doubt they stop and think long enough (or at all!) about whether it might not be true.
the fake stuff is more exciting than the real world
And more likely constructed and disseminated in a manner tuned for social-media distribution. See Halliday's Trust Me, I'm Lying for a wide-ranging but accessible discussion of how blog-and-social-media manipulation works, and how the economies of those vehicles depend on it.
It's not meaningless, but its meaning has been changed. It was initially used to refer to spin put on news by reputable news organisations. An classic example is Trump feeding the fish in Japan: he was said to have done a boo-boo by simply tipping his box of fish food into the pond. However, when Youtube provides the unedited (and uneditorialised) video, it is clear that he simply copied what Shinzō Abe had done. Trump is terrible, but so is the "fake news": it is unbecoming of the 4th estate.
Of course, it is perfectly fine to use the term "fake news" to refer to the clickbait crap that comes out of the East. But it also conveniently distracts from the original use for the term.
"used to refer to spin put on news by reputable news organisations"
All news organizations put a spin on their news. All. The Guardian is as far to the left as Fox News is to the right. That's why intelligent people must read a number of different sources especially ones with which they might disagree.
"Trump is terrible"
Trump's morals would shame an alley cat and his cavorting with the 1% is revolting, but he's the only candidate to note that H-1B / L-1 visas are corporate welfare and that Muslims by and large refuse to assimilate into the general population. But then again, my downvote/upvote ratio exceeds 5.
"clickbait crap that comes out of the East"
Russia? China?
Regarding Trump and coverage of him on the BBC website, I've noticed that they tend to always use angry shouty-face photos of him.
It's quite possible that no other photos exist, I suppose, but there is a certain power there to affect a person's popularity by the use of unflattering images.
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