Homegrown 'fake news' is a bigger problem than Russian propaganda. Here's a way to make falsehoods..

[DonViejo]

Homegrown ‘fake news’ is a bigger problem than Russian propaganda. Here’s a way to make falsehoods more costly for politicians.

By Brendan Nyhan and Yusaku Horiuchi October 23 at 6:00 AM

State-sponsored propaganda like the recently unmasked @TEN_GOP Twitter account is of very real concern for our democracy. But we should not allow the debate over Russian interference to crowd out concerns about homegrown misinformation, which was vastly more prevalent during and after the 2016 election.

Why is misinformation so prevalent and widely believed in U.S. politics?

One explanation for the growth of misinformation is the way people are exposed to — and consume — news today. In particular, concerns have grown about “echo chambers.” According to this theory, people are, intentionally or unintentionally, surrounding themselves with news from like-minded sources. In such environments, people may tend to uncritically believe news content from outlets they trust while dismissing or ignoring information from sources they dislike. If this is true, politicians and commentators may be able to effectively mislead the public by promoting misinformation through allied news outlets. But when one of us (Horiuchi) and his Dartmouth undergraduate co-authors tested this hypothesis in a recent study, they found that the source of the misinformation they showed to study participants (an incorrect news excerpt about the Affordable Care Act) didn’t matter very much. Regardless of the respondents’ party identification or ideology, attributing the article to Fox or CNN had relatively little effect on the news article’s perceived accuracy.

The problem instead was that people were surprisingly vulnerable to believing the misinformation even when it came from an uncongenial source. Far more believed the false claim (that people would lose health coverage from their parents’ insurance plans when they turned 18 under proposed legislation) when they read an article making the claim. In other words, they swallowed the news story without carefully considering whether it was true.

In this sense, concerns about echo chambers may be overstated — a finding that is consistent with other evidence. The problem isn’t that we’re only willing to listen to sources that share our political viewpoint; it’s that we’re too vulnerable as human beings to misinformation of all sorts. Given the limitations of human knowledge and judgment, it is not clear how to best protect people from believing false claims.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/23/homegrown-fake-news-is-a-bigger-problem-than-russian-propaganda-heres-a-way-to-make-falsehoods-more-costly-for-politicians

[NoMoreRepugs]

1. Limitations of knowledge and judgement.. I'll say.

[Scoopster]

2. This problem just got MUCH more widespread.

Even here in Rhode Island, one of our local TV stations which was bought by Sinclair in 2014 is pushing propaganda. They started doing it the DAY the station was sold - I know because I used to watch the station's online newscasts and in the place of the commercials, which are removed from the livestream, was a Sinclair-produced propaganda segment.

Now those propaganda segments are branded "Trump TV" and are being broadcast on the normal channel feed, which thousands of people in Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut and southeastern Massachusetts watch daily. From what I understand this is the case at all of Sinclair's 100+ local channels nationwide.

[Tobin S.]

3. "...it is not clear how to best protect people from believing false claims."

A good start would be by busting up the oligopoly that currently controls our media.

[msongs]

4. make fake news. sucker people into link to twitter. voila, rumors, lies, fake news nt