[HN Gopher] Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinforma...
___________________________________________________________________
Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online
Author : mpweiher
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-03-17 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| antattack wrote:
| 'Close to half' could be also 'majority' or 'minority', depending
| on whose side you are on.
|
| 'Overwhelming majority' better be more than 75% but it's often
| less.
|
| 'Small percentage'...of 300mln people is still a substantial
| number.
|
| Add to that much of arguments we use daily are based on sampling
| which has a varied degree of accuracy.
|
| I think all we can do is to agree to disagree...vote and respect
| voting results.
| colllectorof wrote:
| _" Therefore, shifting attention to the concept of accuracy can
| cause people to improve the quality of the news that they
| share."_
|
| It will not have a significant enough impact on the overall
| collapse of sense-making that we're seeing. Neil Postman wrote
| really well about it in Technopoly, but since the book isn't
| available online, I can only direct you here:
|
| https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE?t=928
| centimeter wrote:
| > the overall collapse of sense-making
|
| I suspect this is caused more by the collapse of (false, but
| easily comprehensible) narratives than an actual reduction in
| coherent reasoning. Most "normies", so to speak, have always
| believed a huge amount of bullshit, and the forces that
| stabilized schelling points in bullshit-space have been
| diminished.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Misinformation is a made up problem. With the amount of
| information we have now it's trivial to push any narrative just
| by amplifying the "right" true information. It's why every
| politician has a source saying they're a sex offender. Most of
| the accusations are real but which one you believe depends on
| where you look. Or just look at all the articles that quote
| nobodies on Twitter.
| Kapura wrote:
| What does it matter if you have a manager, or your manager has a
| manager, who will approve or disapprove a new disinfo policy
| based on whether or not it affects specific political groups? A
| fish rots from the head.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Given that political discourse so often takes the form of "I am
| right and you are wrong", it's easy to foresee that tools to
| prevent the sharing of misinformation will in practice end up as
| tools to prevent the sharing of information from people the
| wielder of the tool disagrees with. Then, it's just another
| propaganda arms race between the information sharing and
| information dissemination technologists of both sides. I think
| this is not the kind of research that will ultimately lead to a
| more healthy public debate.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The researchers anticipate that concern, and specifically
| checked whether "information vs. misinformation" just boiled
| down to partisan disputes about what's true. They found that
| "our participants were more than twice as likely to consider
| sharing false but politically concordant headlines (37.4%) as
| they were to rate such headlines as accurate", suggesting that
| there really is a problem of people sharing things they know
| aren't strictly accurate.
| s17n wrote:
| What does this have to do with the article?
| Natsu wrote:
| Another part of the problem is that you cannot unring a bell.
| For example, the WaPo issued a retraction yesterday:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-i...
|
| The headline quotes from their original story were proven wrong
| when deleted audio of the call was recovered:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-t...
|
| But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already
| used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this:
|
| https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_...
|
| This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter of
| great importance that injected false information into it.
| Information that was somehow 'confirmed' by several other
| publications relying on their own anonymous sources.
| tomComb wrote:
| There is no perfect solution here, but at least they had to
| publicly acknowledge their error. This is much better than
| with the sources most people use.
|
| I often see people say 'hey look at this terrible thing WaPo
| or NYT did' as an excuse for reading whatever garbage source
| is saying exactly what they want to hear.
|
| It's not all of nothing.
| offby37years wrote:
| Bombholing.
|
| > The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news
| cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news,
| before moving to the next controversy so quickly that
| mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.
|
| > As George Orwell understood when he created the "memory
| hole" concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate
| memory can control history.
|
| > The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they
| could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing
| credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves,
| who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up
| anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage
| centers.
|
| > Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer
| understood as mistakes.
|
| https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE
| mistermann wrote:
| Here's a video where an ex-lawyer goes through a NYT
| article on election fraud and absolutely tears apart the
| misleading language they use to build the case that there
| was "no" election fraud:
|
| https://youtu.be/TmgMu5sefzA
|
| The beauty of this style of reporting is that the writer's
| skill with words allows them to plant specific ideas into
| reader's minds, but if anyone was to call them out on the
| carpet, they can _completely truthfully_ say that nothing
| in the article is untrue, or _explicitly_ asserts
| conclusions that any typical reader would naturally draw.
|
| The NYT is arguably one of the best news outlets going, so
| I'm not sure how one could hope that this situation will
| ever improve.
| hef19898 wrote:
| To be honest, that's exactly the retraction that makes WaPo
| stand above the pack. They had a source, based the article on
| it (after verification). Then the primary source got
| available, certain details were different and WaPo changed
| the article. The core message, so, still stands. As a matter
| of fact, didn't the Georgia AG start an investigation into
| this affaire?
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| idk, this whole scandal ended up making me less trustworthy
| of WSJ.
| kodah wrote:
| The damage is done though, so I don't know that I see this
| as a thing to be happy about. I am curious if the source is
| known or unmasked at a later date what does accountability
| look like?
|
| If WaPo is the only one who can be held accountable and
| their only accountability is issuing a retraction, that
| seems like a gameable system.
| didibus wrote:
| What's the alternative? Stop reporting news altogether?
|
| I feel as a news org, the best you can do is just report
| the data as it becomes available. Obviously later data
| could contradict prior data or clarify its
| interpretation. What matters though is the accuracy of
| the data reported, not in the data being a perfect
| predictor of the outcome, but that this is accurately the
| current known data, even if it later comes to be shown
| incomplete or misleading.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >What's the alternative? Stop reporting news altogether?
|
| Maybe don't report something that one person told you and
| that you can't otherwise confirm?
|
| That used to be the way that news was done, right?
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I'm curious what damage you think was done here?
| joshuamorton wrote:
| They did not issue a retraction. They issued a correction.
| The precise language of the call is different, but the core
| of the reporting is unchanged.
|
| The precise differences are that, what was quoted as "find
| the fraud" was actually find "dishonesty", and you'll "a
| national hero" was actually that you have "the most important
| job in the country right now". This doesn't change the
| overall story: Trump attempted to reach out to GA election
| officials and push them to overturn election results.
|
| > But the harm was already done, the misinformation was
| already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of
| this:
|
| None of the citations on page 10 reference this reporting or
| any of the quotes attributed to Trump on this call.
| tryonenow wrote:
| >This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter
| of great importance that injected false information into it.
|
| And the [likely politically deliberate] regularity with which
| this has been happening for years makes me very uneasy to
| read articles by the same outlets crusading against
| "misinformation". This movement isn't about combating
| misinformation, it's about combatting _their_ misinformation,
| and ensuring that people only see _our_ "true" information
| bgorman wrote:
| Yes, effectively all US media are propaganda for the elites
| at this point. After the way the mainstream media threw the
| election for Joe Biden this past election, I think many
| people will turn to less traditional sources.
|
| It is simply too much of a coincidence that all these false
| stories about Donald Trump got published, yet any negative
| story about Joe Biden, e.g. the Hunter Biden scandal was
| thrown down the memory hole.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > Yes, effectively all US media are propaganda for the
| elites at this point.
|
| With you up to here. This is not exactly a new
| development though.
|
| Everything else in your post is disputable or dubious but
| I feel that I have little chance of changing your opinion
| on that.
| macintux wrote:
| Which false stories about Trump? This one was wrong in
| some details; what else do you have?
| marcusverus wrote:
| The real issue isn't the 'false' stories. Most 'false'
| stories are from hyper-partisan outlets that don't really
| matter. The mainstream media rarely writes 'false'
| stories, because lying is dumb. Lying creates blowback,
| which harms your credibility and hamstrings your ability
| to shape the narrative. If your goal is to _mislead_ ,
| the best path to tell the truth, the politically
| convenient truth, but never the whole truth. That way,
| folks like you can (plausibly!) ask "where's the lie?"
|
| Well, it's hard to put my finger on a specific lie. Even
| if I did, you'd (plausibly!) argue "That's just one
| article!" Luckily, there are plenty of hard data out
| there about how the American people have been misled.
|
| One great example is the Trump tax cuts. 64% of Americans
| got a tax cut, of whom 40% were convinced that they did
| not! [0]
|
| Our media is incapable of informing the people about a
| matter of simple arithmetic!
|
| [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/business/economy/in
| come-t...
| waheoo wrote:
| It's not our job to educate you.
|
| What do you think "fake news" is?
|
| It's just the culmination of all the out of context,
| agenda riddled and biased spinning that the media does.
|
| Go look at how the both sides controversy gets portrayed,
| then go listen to the full speech. Not just the soundbite
| you heard on the Daily show.
|
| I saw the Charlottesville videos, I was horrified, the
| president's statements were hurtful and stupid. But wow,
| the media really took it for a ride.
|
| Aside from that, not everything is about trump, look at
| project Veritas retracto YouTube vids if you want to see
| how the game is played.
|
| What about Tim pool, he covers a lot of this fake news bs
| too.
| [deleted]
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| This article focuses entirely on people regulating their own
| decisions to share an article, not any attempt by a "tool
| wielder" to selectively block any content.
|
| To put their study into context, it suggests that if Facebook
| asked users to rate whether an unrelated article was accurate
| before allowing you to share their own, many people would pay
| attention to whether their own articles were accurate, and less
| misinformation would be shared. This could be applied
| universally to any news article, both for detecting people
| sharing it, and populating the pre-share accuracy judgement.
| Instead, Facebook streamlines the process to increase
| engagement, and people blitz through it without stopping to
| consider the article's accuracy at all, distracted by thinking
| of all the likes they'll get for posting it. According to the
| study, when users are already primed to judge the accuracy of
| an article, they are more likely to self-regulate their own
| misinformation.
| didibus wrote:
| Absolutely, what more, and I'm culpable of this too, often
| things are re-shared where you only read the headline, or
| even just skimmed through the article barely reading it or
| spending any time to think through it.
| dfay wrote:
| You should carefully read the paper linked. Your comment may be
| correct but it's not a valid criticism of the methods the study
| used.
| yorwba wrote:
| But the tool in the article is to ask people whether they think
| a certain headline is accurate and then looking at the effect
| that has on their sharing of other articles. If someone with
| the "I am right and you are wrong" mindset shares fewer
| articles they think are not accurate, they'll actually be right
| more often. (At least in their own opinion.)
|
| If this gets weaponized to make people on "both sides" pay more
| attention to the accuracy of what they're sharing, I'd expect
| that to result in a more healthy public debate.
| buffalobuffalo wrote:
| Interesting, but long term probably irrelevant. I think we are
| almost at the end of the era of un-curated online information. As
| the technology to deploy bots that are indistinguishable from
| humans becomes more widespread, the proportion of online
| conversations that even involve humans is going to trend towards
| zero. Eventually, it's all going to be such hyperbolic noise that
| nobody will even pay attention.
| renewiltord wrote:
| In general, allowing people to misinform themselves and the
| people in their circle is a good thing. It applies competitive
| pressure so that superior information extractors can have an
| advantage over inferior information extractors. Long-term human
| survival depends on superior information extraction, so it is
| better that poor information extractors are currently culled or
| weakened.
|
| For instance, I love that Bloomberg News is beloved by many
| Americans, notably (to this audience) HN readers. That's how I
| made money off the SuperMicro news. I, through pre-existing
| experience, knew that they were a low quality news source
| incapable of technology reporting of any calibre. Others, since
| they lacked this knowledge, sold SMCI. I bought at a discount as
| a result, and made money.
|
| This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the
| curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem1: they are secular
| information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty
| identity.
|
| 1 I am neither a tech luminary nor one of these people because I
| had this false picture of the competence of the CDC - an error
| that cost me six figures.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Your conclusion doesn't at all follow from your premise.
|
| It's at best a modern-malthusian position, that those who are
| strongest at information extraction should survive. (As opposed
| to Malthus's original proposition, that only the wealthy should
| survive).
|
| But this begs the question: what makes "information extraction"
| the thing that we should optimize for at social scale? If we
| can make it so that everyone has access to correct information,
| there will no longer be a need to compete on information
| extraction.
|
| This similarly tracks with Malthus's wrongness: we don't
| actually need to compete on food prices, as we've got enough to
| go around, there isn't a shortage of food for only the wealthy.
| And this is true at world scale. Barring some kind of massive
| catastrophe, we aren't at risk of global starvation where a
| Malthusian approach would make sense.
|
| > This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the
| curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem1: they are secular
| information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty
| identity.
|
| Taking this to its logical conclusion, you are saying that it
| is a better outcome that the CDC was wrong, as some tech
| luminaries made money, than if they had not made money and the
| CDC had provided superior initial guidance, saving thousands of
| lives.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| This nice sounding theory is trivial to disprove.
|
| Salem Witch Trials.
|
| It's often not advantageous to know the truth, especially when
| the truth is complicated or uncomfortable. It will be rejected
| or ignored.
|
| You frequently have far more of a competitive advantage if you
| can make others believe something, whether it's true or not.
|
| Outside of some very specific domains (like investing, but even
| markets are irrational), I don't think it's accuracy that makes
| information powerful, it's emotion.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Unfortunately "accuracy" has been recoded to "insurrectionist".
|
| Take for instance the recent retraction published by the
| washington post about Trumps interaction with the Georgia
| Secretary of State pressuring him to "find votes".
|
| People pay close attention to the news pointed out the
| misinformation that WaPo was peddling, and how dangerous it was,
| and those people were called every mean name in the book.
|
| Eventually those people will just _stop_ pointing out the
| innacuracies in reporting.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Why are people downvoting this? Are you happy that the
| washington post gave you fake news that made you feel good?
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| What's Fake News about it? Fake News is intentional
| misinformation, such as "the Pope supports Trump" or the idea
| that Putin didn't do everything he could to install Trump
| twice.
| rscoots wrote:
| The quotes in thier headline were entirely fabricated, and
| several other news organizations who claimed to have had
| "independently verified" the quotes also spread the lie for
| months. So yes, the exact organizations who are arguing for
| censorship are themselves lying routinely and with no
| accountability.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| We all heard the actual audio of that call, and he absolutely
| was pressuring the secretary of state to find votes. So while
| WAPO got inaccurate quotes the content of the call was
| absolutely "insurrectionist".
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Do you see what you are doing right here? You're leaving out
| the _context_ to make a political point.
|
| Yes, he _was_ asking the SoS to "find votes". However, the
| claim was: "We believe that there may be over 100k votes
| which could fail signature verification, and we only need you
| to find several thousand of them, a small fraction of what we
| believe you will find."
|
| That is _very_ different than what both you and the WaPo
| implied.
|
| The claim is related to signature verification. So argue with
| that if you don't agree with it. But that _isn 't_ what
| happened.
| btilly wrote:
| He didn't just want her to find votes that can fail
| signature verification, he wanted her to look for them in
| specific areas that vote heavily Democratic. Which means
| that he was not asking her to validate that people voted
| accurately, he was asking her to slip her thumbs on the
| scales and make the vote come out his way.
|
| That is why he "needed" her to do so. Because he wanted the
| vote to come to the result that he wanted, and not the
| result that reflected the actual will of the voters.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > That is very different than what both you and the WaPo
| implied.
|
| It is not. There was no evidence to support the belief that
| there were _any_ votes that failed signature verification.
|
| Put another way, Trump was asking the SoS to apply a higher
| than usual level of scrutiny only to Democrat-leaning
| ballots in order to win him a state that he lost.
| mpweiher wrote:
| That is absolutely within the bounds of the generic "find
| me the votes".
|
| There is always some pretext for finding those votes.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| I'm blown away there are people on HN peddling the
| Fox/Newsmax/OAN cinematic universe.
| belltaco wrote:
| Same, I have also encountered QAnon believers on here.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| The irony of this comment on this thread is incredible.
| The _washington post_ is now "Fox/Newsmax/OAN" cinematic
| universe? Like...what?
| bena wrote:
| I think you misunderstand. The person was responding to
| the person suggesting that Trump was doing something very
| legal and very cool. He wasn't talking about the
| Washington Post, or suggesting that it's part of the
| right wing misinformation machine.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| The Washington Post are the ones the published the
| retraction.
| bena wrote:
| Oh, you're the person he's responding to.
|
| Ok. Weird.
|
| Trump was pressuring Georgia to overturn and invalidate
| votes. He was interfering with the election.
|
| To suggest that he wasn't doing that is what
| knowaveragejoe means by peddling the Fox/OANN/Newsmax
| line.
|
| So while the Washington Post may not have gotten the
| exact words right. It's not like they were wrong about
| what was occuring. The worst that could be said is that
| they were paraphrasing.
|
| It's like you're suggesting Trump should be let off the
| hook because of a technicality.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I guess I'm not following you here because it seems like
| you're making a pretty wild claim. Are you saying that
| the original story was correct, but it was the
| _retraction_ which was somehow wrong?
|
| That just seems...odd.
|
| Or are you just not seeing the story or something?
|
| > Correction: Two months after publication of this story,
| the Georgia secretary of state released an audio
| recording of President Donald Trump's December phone call
| with the state's top elections investigator. The
| recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump's
| comments on the call, based on information provided by a
| source. Trump did not tell the investigator to "find the
| fraud" or say she would be "a national hero" if she did
| so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize
| ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find
| "dishonesty" there. He also told her that she had "the
| most important job in the country right now." A story
| about the recording can be found here. The headline and
| text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes
| misattributed to Trump.
|
| The story was wrong. It wasn't that they _just_ misquoted
| him. The quote was the predicate for the entire story
| which they are now acknowledging was made up.
|
| >pressuring to overturn and invalidate votes
|
| Yes, but if those votes were cast illegally, _shouldnt_
| they be invalidated? That is the core debate here.
|
| "If votes are cast illegally, they should not be counted"
| does not seem like it should be a controversial claim,
| and the absolutely absurd amount of spin and
| misinformation that people are putting out to try and
| claim that it should even be up for debate is incredibly
| damaging to having a functioning democracy.
|
| And in fact I would say that some of the comments here
| are doing a good job of illustrating the damage that this
| sort of misinformation can have.
| ddingus wrote:
| I submit clarity would improve even more.
|
| By clarity, I mean fact and opinion very clearly differentiated.
|
| Facts are common.
|
| For a given story:
|
| There are facts.
|
| Some of those may be disputed. Fine. Great discussion to have.
|
| At some point, we arrive at opinion, and this generally is what
| the authors believe the facts mean.
|
| Bias colors all of that. There is always bias.
|
| Always.
|
| The emphasis on clarity gets at the influence of bias by making
| it easy to understand what the bias actually is.
|
| Currently, we largely sidestep bias with various, low clarity
| arguments:
|
| Official
|
| Fair and Balanced
|
| Objective (this actually takes a number of us working together
| over a sustained time to do. You can be 1000 percent sure it does
| not ever happen in a cable news cycle. Ever.)
|
| Size, with 3 and up to few letter big players attempting to be
| reputable because reasons.
|
| You get the idea.
|
| Clarity is powerful. It implies accuracy, helps people to
| understand bias and when bias is different from stated intent or
| claims of authority, or publication of record, note, stature.
|
| Did I mention there is always bias?
|
| Always?
|
| A great example in the US might be coverage from the labor point
| of view versus big business point of view.
|
| Larger, established organizations rarely publish or broadcast
| from the labor point of view. Low clarity material makes
| understanding that as well as what is fact and what is opinion
| very hard to discern.
|
| Small orgs, indie media, often does more from the labor point of
| view, and lower clarity beings the same difficulty.
|
| Many more examples abound!
|
| Low clarity facilitates endless meta too:
|
| Who is objective? (Nobody in reality, but they all say "the other
| people" are "a problem" or "are untrustworthy" somehow.
|
| This is all expensive and useless.
|
| I could go on.
|
| Greater clarity. It will help. By nature, it is more accurate. It
| makes bias more easily understood.
|
| And on that point, bias is OK! It takes too many of us too long
| to be objective. We can benefit from well understood bias and
| seek multiple points of view to help us be informed and form our
| own opinions.
|
| Clarity requires disclosure.
|
| It will also force truth in branding.
|
| "News you can trust" means nothing when it is an unclear mess of
| fact, opinion, bias all mashed together to get a reaction, is it?
|
| Nope.
|
| I submit a push for clarity does the most good.
|
| I say that, because we can't solve the thinking for people
| problem. We can Empower them to think better, and we can give
| them more clear material to think with, and we can foster
| discussion that encourages common ground, but we can't actually
| think for them.
|
| And just as an example, when I was a little kid in primary school
| we had a media class.
|
| That class covered the basic types of propaganda, with
| advertising as a vehicle to demonstrate all of them. It had a
| topic on bias, identifying the point of view from which the piece
| was written and why that matters.
|
| It even talked about clarity. In any given piece, are fact and
| opinion well differentiated?
|
| Where they aren't, that piece isn't very reputable, or useful, or
| the minimum you need to do is seek more information if you're
| intrigued at all.
|
| We read articles from the labor point of view, we read articles
| written from overseas, ones from the local newspaper, from big
| business, and we talked about them and we found the common facts
| and we found out how to think for ourselves.
|
| That was seventh grade. In a small backward town no less!
|
| I am regularly shocked at how poor our media is today, and how
| ill-equipped so many of us are to deal with it.
|
| All of these rule based schemes avoid both the clarity and trust
| problems inherent in all media.
|
| Secondly, they sidestep the intended discourse!
|
| Not only are we supposed to be thinking for ourselves, but we are
| to be understanding one another well enough for policy
| discussions to make better overall sense!
|
| All of this is why we used to teach critical thinking in primary
| education.
|
| Today, we do not do that very well and look at the mess!
|
| Software won't fix this. Humans doing the work to improve will.
| saas_sam wrote:
| Nature retracted a peer-reviewed paper last November after
| pressure from those with a particular political/ideological bent.
| You can read the details here and decide for yourself if their
| reasoning is valid for the retraction. Did not seem very valid to
| me personally, especially given they did not retract the authors'
| prior work using similar methods (but with a conclusion the
| aforementioned political actors would find most pleasing, rather
| than upsetting): https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/21/nature-
| communications...
| jberryman wrote:
| Why are you grinding your axe in this thread? Totally
| irrelevant to TFA
| saas_sam wrote:
| I think skepticism of the source's authoritativeness on the
| subject of information-filtering is perfectly relevant to
| TFA. But you are free to disagree and downvote if you want to
| punish me further.
| sudhirj wrote:
| So to all the people working in social media, can you add a
| slider at the bottom of every share widget asking people to rate
| how accurate what they're sharing is on a scale of 1 to 10? You
| don't even need to store the result, it looks like forcing people
| to think will solve a lot of the world's problems.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Truth isn't a popularity contest.
| teawrecks wrote:
| It would become a meme to share obviously fake stuff with the
| slider maxed out, and we're right back in Poe's law.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Why? No one would see the slider maxed out, so there's no
| point in playing the fool. The study makes an interesting
| point, that putting a slider there would force the person to
| make decision. Either they're sharing something they think is
| nonsense, so they think twice -- or they have reason to
| believe stuff is accurate, which the study is saying people
| are actually pretty good judges of.
|
| No one want to say something is accurate and be thought of a
| fool later. Making this choice forces you to be a scientist,
| in that you're now making a statement that's falsifiable.
| Even better when it's probabilistic.
| IncRnd wrote:
| The existence of a slider won't force anyone to do
| anything. People will ignore your slider. Some people will
| only use it in one direction, and others will use it only
| in the other direction.
|
| You aren't accounting for human nature. People aren't
| robots.
| mcBesse wrote:
| Seems to me that the _mere_ existence of the slider would
| force people to share less misinformation, regardless of
| whether they seriously consider the rating they give or
| just ignore the slider altogether the second time they
| see it. In the language of the article, it would work by
| priming people to be more aware of accuracy.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You're making the assumption that people would care about
| a slider and that it would be part of a behavior loop.
|
| People might very well laugh at the slider and not be
| intimidated into respecting its power of graduated
| informational judgement. As of now, after two hours, the
| only two replies to the GP are saying they would ignore
| the slider.
|
| Why do you believe a slider would force people not to
| share misinformation? There must be some basis for that
| opinion.
| edbob wrote:
| > Why do you believe a slider would force people not to
| share misinformation? There must be some basis for that
| opinion.
|
| "Force" is a strawman, but there is a clear basis for
| thinking that an accuracy slider could cause people to be
| more thoughtful about sharing: the results of this study,
| which found that "subtly inducing people to think about
| accuracy" resulted in "participants in the treatment
| group were significantly less likely to consider sharing
| false headlines compared to those in the control group,
| but equally likely to consider sharing true headlines".
| The effect found was quite significant.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Or they'd just ignore it. It's like upvotes/downvotes, I'd
| guess most people never use them. I rarely upvote or
| downvote anything here, compare to how many posts I read.
| mcBesse wrote:
| Seems to me that the results of the article suggest that such a
| slider would help. But I wonder if it wouldn't lose its effect
| after a while as people get exposed to it and begin filtering
| it out, a la cigarette warning labels and cookie consent
| banners _? Regardless, it seems like there 's a lot of
| potential here for social media sites to make a significant and
| positive change without turning to stricter moderation which
| can in itself be problematic.
|
| _: Does anyone know if that's actually the case?
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Has that ever worked? Rating schemes turn into approval scales
| for whatever people want them to, not what they're called.
|
| The Slashdot moderation system might work up to a point. In the
| end, subscribing to moderators you trust (instead of
| subscribing to killfiles like Mastodon and Twitter groups use)
| may be the only way to evaluate comments.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Not a rating scheme, the value would the thrown away and
| never shown to anyone. The point isn't to collect
| information, only to force the sharer to think.
| 7786655 wrote:
| And the sharer is just going to trust you to throw away
| that information? I don't think so.
| mcBesse wrote:
| Most people aren't careful about what information is
| collected on them in the first place. Are people going to
| stop sharing things on Twitter because they're afraid of
| giving up one more tidbit of information to big data? I
| don't think so.
|
| It's besides the point anyway. Any mechanism that primes
| or prompts the sharer to be mindful of accuracy before
| sharing could help reduce sharing of misinformation,
| according to the results from the article.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Really surprised that no social media with nano-payment-
| funded distributed and syndicated moderation exists.
| Centralization of moderation is taken as de facto, but I'm
| skeptical that it has to be this way.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Who moderates the moderators in such a system? Would it be
| structured like the Wikipedia editor hierarchy?
| aaron-santos wrote:
| The customers ultimately. Moderators should produce
| moderations which result in something people think is
| worth paying for. I'm thinking of a multi-rooted
| aggregation system. Wikipedia is an example of a single-
| rooted system.
| mcBesse wrote:
| What qualities do you think that would incentivize in a
| moderation system? I'm not feeling that tendency to share
| less misinformation is one of them, and I'd fear that
| richer people would have more power to control the
| narrative in such a system by effectively bribing
| moderators.
|
| Apologies if there is something about "nano-payment-
| funded distributed and syndicated moderation" that I'm
| not getting.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Commodifying and creating a market for accuracy-driven
| moderation among other types of moderation shifts the
| conversation toward the question "Is misinformation a
| market failure?" If that's the case then we have a much
| more interesting discussion on our hands.
| mcBesse wrote:
| > Has that ever worked?
|
| From section "Priming accuracy improves sharing":
|
| "[...] sharing discernment (the difference in sharing
| intentions for true versus false headlines) was 2.0 times
| larger in the treatment relative to the control group in
| study 3, and 2.4 times larger in study 4. Furthermore, there
| was no evidence of a backfire effect, as the treatment effect
| was actually significantly larger for politically concordant
| headlines than for politically discordant headlines"
|
| In other words, people who were primed to pay attention to
| accuracy were significantly less likely to share
| misinformation. Seems to me like an example of it working
| quite well.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Yes, I don't take the studies seriously because I've worked
| on Mechanical Turk. The people primed to pay attention are
| maximizing their workflow, because taskmasters set
| unreasonable time limits, incomprehensible instructions,
| and every action is necessarily out of context. Attention
| there is totally divorced from anyone browsing a news feed.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Did you see when they tested it on Twitter users?
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Yes. The last study looks even worse.
| mclanett wrote:
| What I find both amusing and frustrating is that the linked
| article uses the word "accuracy" 110 times but never explains
| what is meant by it. For example in the headline "Over 500
| 'Migrant Caravaners' Arrested With Suicide Vests", what is meant
| by rating for accuracy? Is it the number 500 and whether it is
| low, exact, or high? Is it whether the people were migrants? Is
| it whether the vests were explosive? Is it whether the story is
| in any way truthful? I really have no idea. Is "accuracy" an
| alias for "truthful" or something else? The article doesn't
| explain.
| yorwba wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _Participants were randomly assigned to then either judge the
| veracity of each headline (accuracy condition) or indicate
| whether they would consider sharing each headline online
| (sharing condition)_
|
| So they use "accuracy" as an alias for "veracity". But they
| don't really need to define it, because the study is about what
| _the participants_ think is accurate, not the researchers.
|
| EDIT: Now that I've made it down to the methods section, I see
| that the wording they actually used was "We are interested in
| whether you think these headlines describe an event that
| actually happened in an accurate and unbiased way." So, their
| measurements refer to whatever the participants interpreted
| that question to mean.
| specialist wrote:
| Truthiness, or lack thereof, is a second order effect.
|
| Algorithms boosting viral content and inauthentic speech are
| first order effects.
|
| --
|
| No, bots, trolls, socketpuppet accounts are not authentic speech.
| I didn't say censorship. I didn't say truthiness. I said
| inauthentic.
|
| No, I didn't say ban inauthentic speech. I'm saying create
| infrastructure for authentic speech. Because currently we have
| very little. So that consumers have a choice.
|
| Yes, keep your pseudonym account. For your all-important
| courageous deep undercover reporting which will definitely be
| recognized with a Pulitzer. To be accepted anonymously, natch.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| >create infrastructure for authentic speech.
|
| What would that look like?
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| > Merely reading false news posts [makes inaccurate beliefs]
| subsequently seem more true.
|
| >the widespread sharing of misinformation on social media is also
| surprising, given the outlandishness of much of this content.
|
| Emotional reactions plausibly drive the first observation, so the
| second observation shouldn't be surprising. If it really is, then
| they don't see the emotional component.
|
| And yet:
|
| >Our results suggest that the current design of social media
| platforms--in which users scroll quickly through a mixture of
| serious news and emotionally engaging content, and receive
| instantaneous quantified social feedback on their sharing--may
| discourage people from reflecting on accuracy.
|
| They conclude that distraction is the cause, and that nagging
| users will solve it ("reminding them about accuracy in a subtle
| way that should avoid reactance"). Yet if the study is flawed,
| and the distraction tied up in emotional outrage, wounded
| identity, and spite, then those nags may only insense the users
| more.
|
| Of course, considering already-distracted Mechanical Turk workers
| and people who link to "right-leaning sites that professional
| fact-checkers have rated as highly untrustworthy" shows that the
| authors of the study failed to consider much more than emotional
| actors.
| varispeed wrote:
| Articles that carry misinformation can be easily found out
| because of the thought schemes they are using. The problem is
| that such language is also used by governments, so that's why
| people are not taught how to spot this. I have a couple of
| friends who seem to be susceptible to fake news and they come to
| me with different stories how something is bad or some weird
| conspiracy theories that I find tedious to debunk for them, but
| even if I do they still have that sense that because someone has
| authority, even if what that person saying or writing is not
| true, it is true for them. When I try to show them these schemes,
| they don't want to hear it as they think "they got me". This is
| insane and probably they need to find out how they are getting
| this wrong by themselves, just as I did.
| brightball wrote:
| Can it though?
|
| The bigger issue is removal of important details that provide
| context. Everything else can be factually accurate, but tell a
| completely different story. Unless you have first hand knowledge
| you won't know what's missing. You see this all the time if you
| read a story on a subject where you have expertise.
|
| "Tim punched Bob
|
| Bob punched Tim
|
| Tim and Bob shook hands"
|
| Is a very different story than if only "Bob punched Tim" is
| reported. It's accurate...but it changes the story perception.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Every story has a million ways to tell it, they are all biased,
| there is no universal truth even if every word of the story is
| true and nothing factual has been left out. Facts can be
| misleading also, context not to do with the story can matter a
| lot.
|
| I am not even sure how I would go about determining most
| political news is true or factual, even the speeches are
| usually cut down to snippets for the news. Bias is everywhere
| and to determine something is even largely true is an enormous
| amount of work going back to the original source.
|
| A recent example is a Green party female member in the House of
| Lords who said that all men should be under curfew to protect
| women from being attacked at mogjt. Literally what she said,
| but not what she meant at all because the context was after the
| police said women should stay home at night for their own
| safety. Without the context its true, but its also misleading.
| As is my portrayal of the story, as was every news article
| about it. No idea how you fix it, language needs to be more
| facts based as does our culture and even then you are chasing
| more correct not literally true.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Universal truth would require creating quorum with billions
| of people simultaneously.
| edbob wrote:
| This is an extremely dangerous conception of truth. Even
| when practically everyone believed that the sun revolved
| around the earth, the one guy that didn't was still
| correct. Yet he was pretty likely to be oppressed or killed
| for having heterodox views and had best keep his mouth
| shut. I'm sure there are many popular ideas now that are
| believed by a supermajority (or even 95%+) of the
| population which are actually incorrect, although I can't
| say what the correct ideas are or whether they will ever
| become popular.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Even that might not be universal truth.
|
| Billions of Hindus would disagree with billions of Muslims
| who would disagree with billions of Christians, who would
| disagree with billions of unaffiliated people/atheists.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Should we assume that "fake news" is anything where the opinion
| of the other side is not provided?
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Downvoting folks - please keep downvoting, but I'm sincerely
| curious to know what's wrong with including other's part
| comment?
| majormajor wrote:
| For historical context, this used to be regulated in the US
| under the Fairness Doctrine[0] until it was rolled back by
| the FCC as a violation of free speech. Reagan then vetoed a
| congressional attempt to bring it back.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
| glasss wrote:
| I can appreciate this study putting some numbers and metrics to a
| phenomena that I'm sure a lot of people would agree exists.
|
| Something that is probably controversial - I think it is just far
| too easy to share articles, blogs, etc through social media. If
| you were to put in a small hurdle, even just needing to copy-
| paste the actual link to the article instead of clicking a share
| button, I would imagine a significant volume of sharing
| (admittedly everything, including good / accurate information)
| would disappear. If it was just a little bit harder to share
| misinformation, I think it would overall be a benefit.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Presuming that people who don't block third-party scripts to
| add social media widgets to click "share" without copying and
| pasting are automatically posting "misinformation"?
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