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posted by chromas on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the That's-what-they-WANT-you-to-think dept.

In the Salon

There seems to be a lot of science being thrown at the "Trump Phenomenon." Salon covers yet another, and interviews the author.

A new paper, recently presented at the American Political Science Association's annual convention, suggests a widespread motive driving people to share fake news, conspiracy theories and other hostile political rumors. "Many status-obsessed, yet marginalized individuals experience a 'Need for Chaos' and want to 'watch the world burn'," lead author Michael Petersen tweeted, announcing the availability of a preprint copy.

Truth, in such a worldview, is beside the point, which offers a new perspective on the limitations of fact-checking. The motivation behind sharing or spreading narratives one may not even believe can help make sense of a variety of threatening or confusing recent developments in advanced democracies. It also sheds light on disturbing similarities with outbreaks of ethnic or genocidal violence, such as those seen in Rwanda and the Balkan nations during the 1990s.

Preprint of the paper available at PsyArXiv, here. [DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/6m4ts]


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  • (Score: 0, Redundant) by VLM on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:17PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:17PM (#733792)

    I'd tentatively agree with about 90% to 99% of your assessment with the caveat that word choice was extremely weird and weak:

    motivations to “burn down” the entire established democratic ‘cosmos'

    That d in democratic needs to be capitalized to represent the intensely biased level of propaganda from legacy media.

    If, as per

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx [gallup.com]

    somewhere around 68% and climbing of the population see the biased legacy media as comical propaganda; given that, calling any opposition to the bias "fake news" is going to result in making fun of the legacy media.

    If your propaganda is the laughing stock of 68% and rising of the population, don't be surprised at people laughing right back. If you take their comedy seriously, you'll get VERY confused, but if you understand the comedy is a political display of disrespect, then it makes more sense.

    Sort of like the boomer hippies trying to make smoking weed a political act half a century ago; that sounds idiotic out of context, and admittedly many just were in for the LOLs.

    There's a political meaning behind "your propaganda is so laughable we not only won't be an obedient congregation for your sermon, we'll laugh at you and troll you". Its a symptom, perhaps, of the increasing gulf between successful and unsuccessful along political lines. If one group demands and gets a devout sermon preaching to the choir, and the other less religious side sees your sacred sermon as a joke or punchline because they're no longer devout believers, and then you take their apostasy as merely being indication they need more propaganda and indoctrination ...

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:51PM (1 child)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:51PM (#733855) Journal

    We trust the media more than we trust people who cherry-pick two year old polls, though.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @02:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @02:30AM (#733966)

      Pretty sure you trust whoever tells you what you want to believe.