They studied whether the average American can use Google to fact-check news articles and the answer seems to be no. And in particular, some people seem to be really bad at using a search engine:<p>> So what do the low-google-fu people do to generate bad results? Often, they just literally plug the questionable article headline or URL into Google. If your search terms are “SHOCK REVELATION: SHILLARY CAUGHT DRINKING BABIES’ BLOOD AT MARTHA’S VINEYARD ESTATE,” Google’s probably going to give you results that go along with its assumptions.<p>But it doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to fact-check news articles, or that it can’t be taught.<p>It might be interesting to repeat the study for other groups. College graduates? Graduate students?<p>Also, I wonder if it’s possible to build a better search engine with this task in mind?
Circa 2008, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.<p>It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.<p>I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.<p>And it wasn't unique to them. Choose whoever your out group channel is.<p>Almost 10 years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:<p><a href="https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts" rel="nofollow">https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...</a>
"[Claim presented as absolute fact], prove me wrong". That's not how logic/argument/discussion works. If that's how the conversation is structured, that person is arguing in bad faith. It's a simple rule that should be taught at a very young age.
So much "news" today is opinion masquerading as fact. While news media companies often do get the facts wrong, even when the facts are right, those facts are heavily colored by commentary and slant, often leaving out other facts that don't adhere to the narrative. I'm highly skeptical when the author's conclusion is that readers can't discern fake news on their own, when even educated people disagree on what is fake news, when the author thinks that people doing their own research is a problem, and virtue lies in believing the common narrative.
Nothing made me respect mainstream media more than a thousand "alternative" pundits crying foul while not only failing to do better but regressing on the basics: asking accused parties for comment, asking adjacent experts for comment, retracting articles when conflicting evidence arises, clearly delineating op/ed, etc. It's fair to argue that these things aren't sufficient, but it's absolutely wild how easy it wound up being to pass off regression for progression on this front. People really do just want to hear confirmation of their own opinions.
My TL;DR: Some really interesting conclusions here, though nothing particularly surprising to anyone familiar with SEO practices. In particular the use of SEO techniques to target "data voids" to help own particular terms or phrases that are then used when searching up more information.<p>> Low-quality publishers have been found to use search engine optimization techniques and encourage readers to use specific search queries when searching online by consistently using distinct phrases in their stories and in other media. These terms can guide users to data voids on search engines, where only one point of an unreliable view is represented. Low-quality news sources also often re-use stories from each other, polluting search engine results with other similar non-credible stories…<p>Again, nothing most people here don't already know about the overlap between SEO and misinformation, but it is interesting to see some numbers behind the effect.<p>> We found that, among those who first rated the false/misleading article correctly as false/misleading, 17.6% changed their evaluation to true after being prompted to search online (for comparison, among those who first incorrectly rated the article as true, only 5.8% changed their evaluation to false/misleading after being required to search online).<p>One of the most interesting techniques exposed here is the use of unique terms that can then be easily owned by the misinformation outlets and likely to be used by those searching for more information.<p>> Using the headline/lede as a search query probably produces unreliable results because they contain distinct phrases that only producers of unreliable information use.<p>> The term ‘engineered famine’ in the article is a unique term that is unlikely to be used by reliable sources. An analysis of respondents’ search results found that adding the word ‘engineered’ in front of ‘famine’ changes the search results returned. 0% of search terms that contained the word ‘famine’ without ‘engineered’ in front of it returned unreliable results, whereas 63% of search queries that added ‘engineered’ in front of the word ‘famine’ were exposed to at least one unreliable result. In fact, 83% of all search terms that returned an unreliable result contained the term ‘engineered famine.’
> But what’s the most enraging thing your uncle can say at Thanksgiving, right after he tells you about how the Rothschilds are behind an army of Colombians set to invade Idaho next week? “I’ve done my own research on this.” In other words:<p>This is an example of <i>The Cowpox of Doubt</i>: <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/</a>
This week I learned about the “do your own research movement” on the podcast Amicus<p>Deja Coup: Donald Trump and the Slow Civil War<p><a href="https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2024/01/donald-trump-january-6-capitol-riot-ashli-babbitt" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2024/01/donald-trump-janua...</a>
Whenever I look at examples of something that the sort of people who use the term “misinformation” call misinformation it’s - almost always a direct quote, presented with no further elaboration, from somebody they dislike. Presenting an accurate Joe Biden quote (for example) isn’t misinformation, and “doing the research” means making sure it wasn’t taken out of context.
Social media is "the place" with the propagandist bots and partisan screamers? As opposed to where?<p>There are at least two significant red flags in this article:<p>a. It cites five studies, which it does not critique, instead of being a more serious review of one. Without a critique of any of the studies, the author restating their conclusions as some sort of pseudo meta-study is ironically low information. Given the forceful conclusions, an examination of the methodologies is crucial for persuasion.<p>b. The article is openly partisan.<p>Given how the terms "fake news", "misninformation" and "debunk" have been politicized and abused into virtual meaninglessness over the past eight years, the utilization of only those unexamined terms as the article's pillars does not make for compelling reading.