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A study shows that misinformation spreads faster and farther than correct information:
An analysis of news stories tweeted by three million people between 2006 and 2017 shows that fake news spreads significantly more than the truth on social media.
[...] Truthful tweets took six times as long as fake ones to spread across Twitter to 1,500 people – in large part because falsehoods in the sample were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, even after accounting for account age, activity level and their number of followers. The most viral fake news was political in nature.
The study was carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Social Machines.
From The Inquirer.net : False stories travel way faster than the truth, says study
and New Scientist : Fake news travels six times faster than the truth on Twitter
and The Economist : On Twitter, falsehood spreads faster than truth.
(Score: 2, Troll) by jmorris on Sunday March 11 2018, @12:26AM (7 children)
If only we had an institution with members who were widely trusted to accurately collect and disseminate information in a timely way. There is a word that used to mean exactly that, journalism, but now it it generally refers to incompetent lying political hacks who work for the Democratic Party but get paid by some huge corporation as a contribution in kind to the Party, for which they expect political influence and favors in return.
We need a return to actual journalism. Where moderately paid ink stained wretches go out and see the things we don't have time to, then accurately report the details in an easy to digest way to the masses. They just report the who, what, when, why, where, etc. Being the 21st Century they shoot video where appropriate. But the don't spin or offer analysis because everybody knows these aren't major thinkers with an opinion that matters, they are lowly journalists. Journalism is a low paid but steady job for those with English majors and such who are otherwise unemployable in better paying fields. Doesn't take a genius to go out and witness what other people are saying and doing. The sites who hire these journalists would maintain a reputation for accuracy and completeness within the areas they cover. They would probably end up with paywalls, but we can hope enough people would pay a little for accurate, timely and unbiased information.
Think of CSPAN as exemplar. Brian Lamb is probably the only recognizable name at the place and he founded it. Yet anyone would be hard pressed to even guess his political leanings based on his work product. Their field of coverage is Congress and U.S. politics and most of what they they do is just carry their cameras around and put up unfiltered accounts of events. They are funded entirely by carriage fees paid by cable and sat providers because customers like it.
Then once we restored widely trusted repositories of raw information, once we could all agree on what happened today, we could support as much punditry and social media as the market could bear as long as they all were expected to base their material with links back to the reliable stores of events.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @01:56AM (3 children)
You are such a boob.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @06:32AM (2 children)
And it is so sad. With just a little effort, jmorris could have been two boobs, and so a decent rack. And that is just with the hormone treatment. After that, we could get some nihilists to cut off his Johnson. If he feels the need to go that way. (Note: none of this is true, so be sure to forward it to everyone you know.)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 11 2018, @12:38PM (1 child)
Well, if none of this is true, then that also applies to that sentence, which in turn implies that some of it actually is true. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @09:17PM
Thus the single boob, per hypothesori.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday March 11 2018, @02:53AM
It's a nice idea, but journalism was never that pure. It has always been that only the occasional individual journalist had honesty and integrity. These few, over time could build up a reputation and credibility with the public.
Where it has gone bad is that the corporate owners realised they could 'monetize' that credibility, and have spent it all. There are probably still honest journos out there, but they don't work for commercial big media, mostly they have a blog of some sort. There are a few still holding out in the BBC and Oz's ABC, but they are under fire too.
The big problem is the sheer quantity of information. You can find twenty different stories about the same event, all internally consistent and apparently objective, but mutually contradictory. How the hell do you ever sort out the truth?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @02:55AM
The soviets had a word for the trusted repositories of raw information you speak of. That word was Pravda.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:01AM
I don't know -- Yellow Journalism was a term coined over a century ago and it seems the press has often been nothing but a tool for pushing the agenda of the oligarchy. The Spanish-American war and WWI being older examples, Yellow Cake, poison gas, and Russian Troll Farms being the current incarnation. I don't think there is a golden age of journalism to hearken back to -- just a long stream of marketing by oligarchs who wish to rob, cheat, and kill their fellow countrypeople for personal profit.