Two new studies published in the journal of Science this week offer a deeper insight into the spread of misinformation on social media, offering evidence that it not only changes minds, but that a small group of committed “supersharers” — predominately older Republican women — were responsible for the vast majority of the “fake news” in the period looked at.
The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well. @TechCrunch has more.
How much does misinformation affect the people who consume it? Researchers at MIT and Penn set out to analyze the impact of 13,000 headlines on vaccination intentions among roughly 233 million U.S.-based Facebook users. Read more from Science Alert, including what type of content had the biggest influence over vaccine hesitancy. https://flip.it/jbP52i #Science#Health#SocialMedia#Misinformation
Russia may launch psychological operation about opening new front from Belarus
Defense Council Center for Countering #Disinformation forecast launch of a new #Russian#psychological operation about opening a new front aiming to stir up mass panic in Ukrainian society
We expect a series of provocative statements by the top leadership of Russia and #Belarus#threatening#Ukraine soon
Ep.1 is about The Well and British Journalist #JamieBartlett claims that The Well was the world's first social network.
Before he was even born the Brits (and Europeans!) were running big, successful online social media sites and I think we mostly understood the potential consequences.
From an American? Fine - But come on BBC/Jamie! Do your research or get Tom Sandage to fact-check a little. Grr!
"After The Markup first reported on how Ohlala regularly translated misleading far-right websites like The Gateway Pundit and Newsmax into Vietnamese, more than a dozen Vietnamese community members asked The Markup to dig further. They wanted to know why she was broadcasting in Vietnamese and why her videos were so heavily pro-Trump. Several community members also shared suspicions that she was a Russian agent..."
⭐ Last year's theme for our games was #criticalthinking because it's clear bad actors will continue to use mis/disinformation to influence and harm young people.
We'll do what we can to prevent this through the use of intentionally designed prosocial video games.
Here are some tips from our free game 'MushWhom?' for students
💡 Be Curious
💡 Be Questioning
💡 Be Open
The narrator (Critical Thinking Cat) shares these tips and how they apply both to the game & to real-life.
Company posts #misinformation about me. Company continues to post misinformation about me after I tell them what they wrote was false. Here is the consequence.
"Facebook users who deactivated their accounts for six weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election weeks may have been less likely to cast a vote for Trump [...]."
In AP's fact check of "fake news" this week, they highlighted that the ICC did not actually issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. That was a little unclear to me on Monday, because of this headline from #UnitedPressInternational, which was on the front page of their site Monday:
"ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, 3 Hamas Leaders"
“Blake Murdoch at the University of Alberta said #DanielleSmith framing the town hall as a chance to look at the international evidence of harm to children by COVID vaccines is a “reckless misrepresentation of what this event” is based on the guest list. (1/4)
“The issue is not that there is a difference of opinion here. It’s that there is a huge amount of science that shows that these #VaccinesSaveLives and they are overwhelmingly safe so to claim otherwise becomes a statement of #misinformation,” (4/4)
'Just 10 "superspreader" users on Twitter were responsible for more than a third of the misinformation posted over an eight-month period, according to a new report.
In total, 34 per cent of the "low credibility" content posted to the site between January and October of 2020 was created by the 10 users identified by researchers based in the US and UK.'
#MediaLiteracy#FactChecking#Disinformation#Misinformation: "When it comes to not falling for misinformation, being aware of our human fallibilities, such as our quickness to believe what we want to believe, is a good first step. Research shows that even being more reflective in general can "inoculate" us against believing fake news.
But it's not the only thing that we can do. In particular, researchers have found there are several simple, concrete strategies that we all can (and should) use, especially before we're tempted to share or repeat a claim, to verify its accuracy first.
One of my favourites comes with a nifty acronym: the Sift method. Pioneered by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, it breaks down into four easy-to-remember steps."