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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Information Age has had impacts on humanity for which we still don't fully understand. How multitasking can be bad [integrativehealthinstitute.ca] in general, bad for your memory [nytimes.com], data theft is now the modern bank heist, and basic literary skills are declining as people are permanently glued to their mobile device. Sadly, this has also impacted news reporting with the advent of fake news. Sadly, not even respected news outlets are except with articles being written based on baseless statistics. A poll involving just 1027 people asked about resettling people to New Zealand [theguardian.com] resulted in a headline trumpeting that almost 80% of people polled supports resettlement. That is less than 820 people out of 25 million people in Australia have show support for resettlement. The article goes on to say that this poll will add pressure to the issue. Another article [theguardian.com] quotes the poll results without stating that only 1027 were polled out of the 25 million people in the country. The poll results then get picked up by other [thenewsheadline.com] news outlets creating fake news [stuff.co.nz] where the results of the poll make it seem like the results are statistically significant where they are not. Is this the world we live in now, where fake news propagates on the back of opinion pieces and fluff, and carefully crafted data takes the place of relevant real world information.

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