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FiveThirtyEight is covering the efficacy of fact-checking and other methods to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Fact-checking, after the fact, is better than nothing, it turns out. There are some common factors in the times when it has been done successfully:
Political scientists Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood conducted an exhaustive battery of surveys on fact-checking, across more than 10,000 participants and 13 studies that covered a range of political, economic and scientific topics. They found that 60 percent of respondents gave accurate answers when presented with a correction, while just 32 percent of respondents who were not given a correction expressed accurate beliefs. That’s pretty solid proof that fact-checking can work.
But Porter and Wood have found, alongside many other fact-checking researchers, some methods of fact-checking are more effective than others. Broadly speaking, the most effective fact checks have this in common:
- They are from highly credible sources (with extra credit for those that are also surprising, like Republicans contradicting other Republicans or Democrats contradicting other Democrats).
- They offer a new frame for thinking about the issue (that is, they don’t simply dismiss a claim as “wrong” or “unsubstantiated”).
- They don’t directly challenge one’s worldview and identity.
- They happen early, before a false narrative gains traction.
It is as much about psychology as actually rebutting the disinformation because factors like partisanship and worldview have strong effects, and it is hard to reach people inside their social control media echo chambers from an accurate source they will accept.
[Though often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, one is reminded of the adage: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. --Ed.]
Previously:
(2020) Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts Pushing to Reopen America May be Bots
(2019) Russians Engaging in Ongoing 'Information Warfare,' FBI Director Says
(2019) How Fake News Spreads Like a Real Virus
(2019) More and More Countries are Mounting Disinformation Campaigns Online
(2019) At Defcon, Teaching Disinformation Campaigns Is Child's Play
(2018) Why You Stink at Fact-Checking
(2017) Americans Are “Under Siege” From Disinformation
(2015) Education Plus Ideology Exaggerates Rejection of Reality
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday June 06 2020, @11:41AM (3 children)
Yes, those links were over the top, but they were made that way by those who said or did them. I did not embellish at all. That kind of language began immediately in Trump's term. Before Trump took office, Obama was working to undermine his administration with the Russiagate investigation. All that was said and done because they didn't like Trump.
Trump warned rioters against rioting, that is, responding to actual violence, and suddenly he's the one "inciting violence." It's preposterous. It's absurd. It offends common sense.
You're insinuating that it was some plan of his to bring things to this pass. Are you blaming him for the coronavirus? Are you blaming him for the lockdowns instituted by Democratic mayors and governors in New York, California, and Michigan? Are you blaming him for the sudden, massive unemployment and economic implosion that caused? Are you blaming him for what some cops in Minneapolis did, a Democratic town in a Democratic state?
I know all this is talking to the wind, because what remains of the Democrats in America has descended into gibbering madness. They have gone five times more insane than Republicans went when Obama was president, and that's saying something.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Saturday June 06 2020, @05:27PM (2 children)
The man's been goading violence since his election rallies. It rouses his base - but damages the country.
I'm insinuating no plan - just projecting from existing trend lines. We can all see how he chooses to rouse his base, how he reacts to challenges, what interests he prioritizes. When the man at the helm consistently steers in a certain general direction, you're going to end up certain kinds of places. The particulars almost don't matter.
As for COVID and the reactions - his lack of strong leadership on the issue does impose some responsibility - but basically, once it got well and truly loose in the world we were pretty much economically screwed regardless of what happened - we need only look at the 1918 flu and earlier pandemics to see that. They're all economically devastating because people don't want to get seriously ill and maybe die, regardless of whether there's an official shutdown. The only real question becomes whether you want to shut down officially, or wait until enough people have died that you shut down unofficially. In fact, in 1918 it was mostly those places that shut down soonest and stayed shut down the longest that where in the strongest economic position afterwards, and recovered the fastest.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)
That's your interpretation. Another interpretation is that he tapped into the anger of middle class voters who have felt the American Dream slipping away from them for 40 years. He tapped into that especially acute anger of those voters in the Rust Belt. And he must have struck a chord with them because he won those states.
And we've seen exactly what his opponents in the Establishment have been doing to rouse their base. They began before Trump took office, when Obama ordered the investigation of Trump's team for Russian interference. That is literal sedition, by the way, to interfere with the lawful democratic transition of power. And they have not let up since. They arrested his personal lawyer to try to dig up dirt on him. They used entrapment on Michael Flynn to destroy him as the incoming National Security Advisor, for fuck's sake. Then they tried to impeach him over Ukraine.
What do those trend lines tell you?
The jury is still out on that. The WHO started off praising China's brutal lockdown, wherein they welded people inside their apartments such that they starved to death. Now the WHO says Sweden's approach is the model, which was no lockdown at all. Meanwhile in the US, Trump banned flights from Wuhan early on, so because they think he's a racist figures like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouraged everybody to go out and mingle in Chinese New Year festivities around the city.
And so far, the lockdowns in America have directly or indirectly produced widespread riots and looting, which are generating a second round of urban flight that will dwarf what happened in the 50's and 60's. After all, why would anyone continue to own a home or operate a business in a city whose mayor and city council are trying to de-fund police such that nobody will protect them? Why would you continue to pay the highest taxes in the country for that? The schools are all closed, but those employees all want to continue to get paid tens of billions of dollars every year to do nothing, and meanwhile the tax burden falls on fewer and fewer parents' shoulders.
Watch those trend lines. We are living in the middle of history of what could well be the sharpest, deepest implosion of wealth and weal for American cities that has ever occurred, worse, even than post-1929.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday June 09 2020, @03:58PM
Yes, he tapped into existing anger - and directed it at the powerless rather than the people that created the problem with a half century of rapidly increasing wealth inequality that has reached levels not seen since the days of the Robber Barons. An easy way to score political points at the expense of destabilizing the country.
If you can't see how incriminating this administration's behavior has been, since before the election, and all through the laughable "investigations" that he blocked at every turn, nothing I say here will change your mind, so I won't bother.
>And so far, the lockdowns in America have directly or indirectly produced widespread riots and looting,
If you think the protests are because of the lockdowns, you're a blind fool. The protests are decades overdue, and Trump's normalization of racism and authoritarianism has just poured fuel on the fire.
You also seem to be buying in to the Republican talking point that defunding the police means disbanding them - rather than the actual point of removing the funding for militarization that has turned them into authoritarian thugs over the course of the calamitous "war on drugs", and shifting that money into things that actually reduce crime by tackling poverty and mental health. Whether you have any sympathy for black people at all, I would hope you'd object to the routine (though much less rarely publicized) assault and murder of white people. Black people are on the front lines of that abuse, but the authoritarian abuse that starts with the weak inevitably spreads to everyone else. This is the first time in my lifetime that people are seriously talking about reversing a trend that's been destroying the trustworthiness of cops for many decades. Hell, you remember when their motto was "To Protect and Serve?" It wasn't especially true then, but all