Category: News

People who receive reminders of past misinformation may form new factual memories with greater fidelity, according to an article published in the journal Psychological Science.

Soon after the 2016 presidential election, as debates raged over “fake news” and its influence on the outcome, a landmark report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education provided sobering evidence of just how easily young people are duped by information online. The study, by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), found that middle and high school students overwhelmingly failed to demonstrate the skills necessary to distinguish credible sources from unreliable ones.

Since the release of that report, policymakers and educators have introduced a wave of initiatives aimed at equipping students with stronger digital literacy skills. But as the 2020 election approaches and many of those students become first-time voters, SHEG researchers have found few signs of progress—and the consequences are dire, said Sam Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, who cofounded SHEG in 2002.

“Our democracy depends on access to reliable information,” he said. “And the internet is increasingly where we go to look for it.”

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Last year SHEG released Civic Online Reasoning, a free curriculum for educators to instill strategies for evaluating the trustworthiness of online information. More recently, Wineburg and SHEG director Joel Breakstone joined with colleagues at SHEG and faculty at MIT to develop a free course on how to teach these skills, which launched this
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Fake news. The phrase most notably coined by Donald Trump, and the words we hear too often for our own liking. With the prevalence of social media in our day to day lives, it’s important to recognize the dangers that come with the free flow of information and the extensive reach of social media platforms. 

When it comes to consuming news, conventional news sources such as newspapers and cable news networks are being outpaced by social media platforms. 

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2018, 43% of American adults consume news from Facebook, 21% use YouTube, and 12% look to Twitter for their news. 

Although news has become much more widespread and easier to access, social media and the promotion of the free range of information has also opened a dangerous gate for spreading information that is untrue and often harmful. 

With the election just three weeks away, we must start using the internet in a more responsible and effective way and hold ourselves accountable to the information that we come across. 

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October 12, 2020 – A new online game that puts players in the shoes of a purveyor of fake pandemic news is the latest tactic in efforts to tackle the deluge of coronavirus misinformation costing lives across the world.

The Go Viral! game has been developed by the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab in collaboration with the UK Cabinet Office and media collective DROG.

It builds on research from Cambridge psychologists that found by giving people a taste of the techniques used to spread fake news on social media, it increases their ability to identify and disregard misinformation in the future.

Go Viral! is launched on the heels of a new study from the team behind it, just published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. The latest findings show that a single play of a similar game can reduce susceptibility to false information for at least three months.

“Fake news can travel faster and lodge itself deeper than the truth,” said Dr Sander van der Linden, who leads the project and the Social Decision-Making Lab at Cambridge.

“Fact-checking is vital, but it comes too late and lies have already spread like the virus. We are aiming to pre-emptively debunk, or pre-bunk, misinformation by exposing people to a mild dose of the methods used to disseminate fake news. It’s what social psychologists
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As an octogenarian I have witnessed the political craziness that has arisen during a number of elections, especially as contests tightened in the waning days of a campaign. Although there have been shenanigans perpetrated by both Republican and Democratic parties, over the past 20 years or so the Democrats have developed a pattern of unsupported, last-minute fabrications about their opponents or issues that have gone beyond the pale in their efforts to win.

This pattern is exemplified by the words of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who said “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” What he should have added is “and if you can’t find a crisis, create one.” A perfect example of this is a recent article in The Atlantic, a left-wing magazine owned by Laurene Powell Jobs who, according to the Conservative Freedom Network, “donated a substantial amount of money to Democratic presidential candidate
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Facebook’s fact-checking program relies on third-party fact-checking and news organizations to help weed out fake and misleading news on the platform. That limits the program from scaling up, since there are only so many organizations that do this work.

But what if Facebook could use regular people — people whose day job is not fact-checking — to fact-check articles instead? A new working paper from researchers at MIT suggests that it would be surprisingly effective, even if those people are only reading headlines. “Crowdsourcing is a promising approach for helping to identify misinformation at scale,” the paper’s authors write.

The team used a set of 207 news articles that had been flagged for fact-checking by Facebook’s internal algorithm. (The study was done in collaboration with Facebook’s Community Review team and funding from the Hewlett Foundation.) Two groups were then asked to check the accuracy of the articles: Three professional fact-checkers, who researched the entire articles to make their verdicts, and 1,128 Americans found on Mechanical Turk who determined accuracy based online on the articles’ headlines and lede sentences. The result:

We find that the average rating of a politically balanced crowd of 10 laypeople is as correlated with the average fact-checker rating as the fact-checkers’ ratings are correlated with each
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