By Cabell Gathman, The Daily Dot September 12, 2014
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Most media coverage has approached this kind of rapid viral proliferation of fake content as a problem of consumer intelligence, an account both inflammatory and ableist. Furthermore, it ignores how news and social media, and social interaction itself, actually work. Cries for better media literacy aren’t wrong, but if we want to really push back against hoaxes and other misinformation online, we need to understand why they spread – and how we can stop spreading them.
1. People don’t actually read the content they’re sharing.
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You need to read carefully to contextualize the headline, which even on “real” news sites is often only peripherally related to content. [And can be very misleading]
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2. People don’t consider the legitimacy of specific news sources
This is where Facebook’s attempt at tagging content as “Satire” is meant to provide a shortcut. New hoax sites spring up all the time, however, and it’s hard to keep track. A better approach would be to tag particular sites as “trusted,” and consider any site not so tagged as in need of verification.
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3. People are vulnerable to confirmation bias.
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Social media have only exacerbated the general psychological tendency toward confirmation bias. This becomes especially self-perpetuating on Facebook, where previous interaction with certain topics, or particular friends, drives up representation of that subject and those people on the News Feed.
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When you see a headline that perfectly supports your buddy’s ideology, or even worse, your own, you should be more skeptical of its claims and slower to hit “share.”
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4. People infer legitimacy from “related content.”
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“Related” can mean a lot of things: posted by the same people (your famously unreliable human friends), on the same topic (winter, weather, and flavored condoms are Real Things), or on the same site (a somewhat better indicator).
Don’t assume that Related Articles mean much about the legitimacy of the current piece.
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5. People see a piece of content as more legitimate the more they see of it.
This is where those people who think we fall for online hoaxes because we’re not smart really ignore how human psychology works. On a fundamental level, people are inclined to believe that groups are accurate in their assessments of objective reality.
We believe this so hard, in fact, that many of us doubt our physical senses if other people’s claims contradict them. Social psychologist Solomon Asch initially demonstrated this with the seemingly neutral subject of line length, surrounding research subjects with unknown (though socially similar) others. Imagine how much stronger the effect is when moral or intellectual judgment and your friends and co-workers are involved.
This effect is even further exacerbated on Facebook, where developing social norms may increasingly prohibit explicit disagreement. As we saw last month following the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, while Facebook has a vested interest in hiding controversial content, there is also a tendency among many users to self-censor on the site, even more so than people do in face-to-face social environments.
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6. People confuse satire and hoax.
Speaking up about hoaxes on social media is tricky; people don’t generally like being publicly exposed as wrong. When people attempt to save face by dismissing hoaxes they have shared as “satire,” insinuating that challengers are humorless, the concept of “satire” is being abused.
[But I have shared or said things I thought would be easily seen as satire, but that others took seriously. I have adding [satire] to them.]
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Satire is meant to expose its subject as wrong: evil, ridiculous, or contradictory. False information presented and consumed as fact spectacularly fails as satire, because it doesn’t expose anything.
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tags: influence
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