A traditional belief in “fairness” may need to be modified to call out wat is true. Encouraging critical thinking can help people break free of the conformity bias. Curators of news can call out facts, rather than just presenting information. Many of those who expect the information environment to improve anticipate that information literacy training and other forms of assistance will help people become more sophisticated consumers. They expect that users will gravitate toward more reliable information – and that knowledge providers will respond in kind. However, an Alt News analysis of the video found that it was dated back to February 19.
What if a staged photo were circulated today showing an elderly woman lying on the floor of a COVID vaccination site, with an accompanying article titled “Vaccines Killing People at Alarming Rates”? By the time social media platforms labeled that story and photo as false, millions of people would have seen and shared the content, creating confusion and fear. Vinny Green of Snopes, Jevin West of University of Washington, and Ina Fried of Axios discuss fake news during Day 2 of the GeekWire Summit 2017 at Sheraton Seattle on Wednesday, October 11, 2017. Snopes has been trying to combat the spread of rumors and urban legends since well before the rise of social media, but their efforts have grown exponentially harder as Twitter and Facebook have become huge forces in our lives, Green said. Professor O’Connor highlighted three aspects of humans’ social natures that could affect how information spreads. The first was the idea that humans tend to fall victim to a “conformity bias.” Put simply, this is the concept—observed in psychological studies—of a herd mentality, or an unwillingness to stick out in a crowd.
Rom a simple “like” on social media to a damning headline of false facts on national news, contributors – unknowing and otherwise – to the rise of fake news can be found everywhere from high school desks to bullpens at some of the most reputable news agencies. In their new book, UCI logic and philosophy of science professors Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall explain how fake news comes to be, who some of the biggest culprits are, and how we can all work to kill it before it grows legs. The research is scant regarding older adults’ susceptibility to fake news and what factors might aid or impair a person’s ability to judge the veracity of information. Raising concern, some previous work suggested that older adults shared false information over social media more often than did young adults during the 2016 presidential election. And the dramatic increase in misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened concern, given that the virus has been particularly deadly for older adults.
This makes many vulnerable to accepting and acting on misinformation. For instance, after fake news stories in June 2017 reported Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin had died in a car crash its market value was reported to have dropped by $4 billion. Unfortunately, these otherwise useful technologies can end up being abused. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has come to dominate the media, both domestically and abroad. Alongside increased attention on the pandemic, has come the viral spread ofCOVID-19 fake news online. Several studies investigated whether susceptibility to this illusion increases with age.
“The Misinformation Age – How False Beliefs Spread,” criticizes, “largely make white and Western European culture that had committed atrocities around the world”. “The whole field of statistics” is claimed derived from ‘racial superiority’. O’Connor & Weaterall endorse Sandra Harding, a ‘feminist theorists’ who exposed “the proliferation of rape metaphors, with the scientist forcing Mother Nature to submit”. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.
In this report, generated by an international group of leading scientists and education researchers, we outline the nature of that threat along with why it is important and how it can be addressed. All of these factors are exacerbated by the sometimes unclear messages from officials and leaders. Stein says that the civic engagement post-election and the onslaught of misinformation inspired her to organize the event. The researchers then measured the participants’ analytical reasoning skills, affect and news consumption frequency.
But, the academic community has taken up the challenge of using this moment in the culture to define the terms, to study the impact, to keep the conversation going and set the strategies for combatting its influence. A number of these respondents said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment through various technological enhancements. Many of those who expect no improvement of the information environment said those who wish to spread misinformation are highly motivated to use innovative tricks to stay ahead of the methods meant to stop them. They said certain actors in government, business and other individuals with propaganda agendas are highly driven to make technology work in their favor in the spread of misinformation, and there will continue to be more of them.
He served as executive editor of Gigaom and the Structure conference series. Click below to read an article about the report in Techonomy Magazine. We will need all of these strategies if we want COVID-19 misinformation to stop spreading. Governments often avoid communicating like this, to save face or avoid panic, but the reality is that accessible, reliable and plentiful official information is critical to curtailing the fake kind. We’re at a time when knowing the facts could literally save your life.
Thus, cognitive declines cannot fully explain older adults’ engagement with fake news. Late adulthood also involves social changes, including general trust, difficulty detecting lies, and less emphasis on accuracy when communicating. In addition, older adults are relative newcomers to social media, who may struggle to spot sponsored content or manipulated images. In a post-truth world, interventions should consider older adults’ shifting social goals and gaps in their digital literacy.
Australian health officials need to revise their recommendations to align these messages with emerging scientific evidence. All the more so because when the official messages are confusing, people turn elsewhere. Examples of COVID-19 misinformation include misconstrued understandings of the disease, wishful thinking about false remedies and fanciful implications drawn on how the spread of the virus will play out. The first is disinformation, which is spread intentionally by people in bad faith. In the case of COVID-19, there has been disinformation blaming racial groups, illegal immigrants and even governments for the spread of the virus.
