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Fake news Today it is more widely used than ever.
Political activists who want to unfairly influence voters create false news stories. Uncruel and discreet media companies publish as false clickbaits. The political system spread false propaganda in support of their policies. And the blurry line between entertainment and news leads to writing that doesn’t follow journalistic standards.
The spread of fake news has led to new research on this topic. Since the 2016 US presidential election, more than 4,000 scientific articles have been published on the topic of false news. A systematic review released last month asks the question of how accurate people are determining the news.
Meta-analysispublished in the Journal Nature Human Behavior and combined data from 67 studies, including over 194,000 participants from 40 countries. Articles included in the analysis asked participants to identify news articles as true or false. Researchers found that in most cases research participants could identify true and false news. (Researchers call this identification. ) Their analysis found participants were able to detect true news from false news and were skeptical of false news.
The researchers also looked at the frequency of participants mistakenly labeling true news as false, or what is known as skepticism. bias. They found that participants were more likely to doubt the real news than they believed it.
This speaks to the broader problem of misinformation in society, the research authors explained in their paper. “The problem may be that people are easily fooled and falling too easily because of falsehood, but instead people are overly skeptical and don’t fully believe in reliable information,” they write.
The author also writes that this is concerning skepticism Evidence is shown It is a decline in trust in news media around the world. More people are eschewing the news.
In their analysis, the presence of sources had no statistically significant effect on discriminatory or skeptical bias. There was no news topic either. Participants were more skeptical of the headline presented in a Social Media Use images compared to news stories with images and summary text, or with only text headings.
Participants were able to better identify true false news that was consistent with political beliefs. They were also able to identify false news that was opposed to their political stance, but were more skeptical of their beliefs and conflicting news. “This supports the idea that people are not overly fooled about news they agree with, but instead are overly skeptical of news that they disagree with,” the researchers wrote. “This suggests that interventions need to be more focused on increasing. Openness Rather than increasing skepticism about a congruent perspective, we take the opposite perspective. ”
Of course, the antidote to misinformation is true. Over the past few decades, organizations and businesses have grown dedicated to shedding light on false news.
International Fact Check Network It promotes nonpartisan and transparent fact-checking of news sources. One organization they appreciate is FactCheck.orgthe Annenberg Public Policy Center project at the University of Pennsylvania monitors the de facto accuracy of what is being said by major US political players in television ads, discussions, speeches, interviews and news releases. The other one is Snowan independent company that publishes fact-checking articles and independent investigations.
Takeaway Message: Lots of fake news! In an age of misinformation, research shows that people can identify false news, but are likely to be skeptical of true news stories as well.
