Joshua Benton of Nieman Labs points us today to a recent study about people who "do the research" on fake news. In a nutshell, the researchers found that when people searched Google to check out a news article, it more often than not made them more likely to believe misinformation.
But why? Here's the technical explanation:
Evidence from these results suggest that lower levels of digital literacy correlate with exposure to unreliable news in search results after conditioning on demographic characteristics. A standard deviation increase in ideological congruence also appears to increase the probability of being exposed to unreliable news by a Google search engine.
As the chart shows, a Google search increased confidence in true news being true and fake news being true. In other words: The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. What the study showed was that lots of people have no idea how to use search engines and frequently just type in the headline of a fake news article. This is more likely than not to lead them to sources that confirm the fake news.
One more thing: In case your immediate response is a snide comment about conservatives, the study finds that liberals are a little more likely to be misled by a Google search. So there's that.
>>> liberals are a little more likely to be misled
that could be because conservatives reject any link that looks 'liberal' regardless of veracity, so they're never misled by any false 'liberal' links
whereas a liberal, being somewhat more open minded, might give the benefit of the doubt to misleading conservative links if they aren't obviously batshit crazy
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I'd guess this is not a significant effect and in reality there is no difference between liberals and conservatives; otherwise you'd have to assume that liberals are better at putting together proper search terms* which I doubt very much.
* People's inability to do so is the main explanation for the results of the study.
The whole thing makes a strong case for teaching media literacy. In grade schools. In high schools, In colleges. Vocational schools. On NPR and PBS. And PSAs on Faux and F'book.
Crafting actual media literacy that is useful is very difficult, in large part because partisan politics makes it impossible to state the obvious: mainstream media is the most reliable news we have.
You can't just say: "Don't read Gateway Pundit. Check CNN and a major newspaper like the NY Times or LA Times, and if those agree, that's probably reality."
So, instead, you go through all sorts of contorted descriptions of "lateral reading" and hope that students have the ability to get to enough mainstream media without realizing it.
I'm really not surprised at all by the findings of this study. Any reference librarian will tell you that a large part of their job is "let me Google that for you." When it comes to the misinformation rabbit hole, it's designed to work like this. Just copying and pasting text between fake news sites is much cheaper than trying to write original copy, which sets the stage. The development of specific terminology that only exists in the conspiracy world helps keep people in the loop. None of this is an accident. It's a bit like the scam emails having lots of misspellings and grammar errors; people think it's because the scammers aren't good at English, but in fact they need to quickly winnow out the savvy, and only the clueless miss those obvious markers of concern.
It need not be this complex and jargon heavy. Using a reach engine to get useful results is a learnable skill.
I would be a huge fan of an effort to widely teach digital literacy, a la Finland:
https://finlandeducationhub.com/digital-literacy-in-finnish-education-a-model-for-the-world/
Of course doing that in the US would be considered "partisan" no matter what the stats say.
Well, it is "partisan" under present conditions. The GOP asks their voters to believe in lies.
OT re trump immunity:
using his lawyer's logic (he has absolute immunity unless he's impeached), trump could instruct seal team 6 to slaughter every member of congress
since no congress means no impeachment, his lawyer seems to believe he couldn't be prosecuted for this crime
Don't be giving him ideas.
the gov't lawyer also noted that using trump's theory of immunity, the president could have seal team 6 murder people then resign before he was impeached
fun times
I have also heard this argument: "Trump has already been on trial by impeachment and has been vindicated by the Senate. Changing him now would be double jeopardy." They are just throwing things at the wall.
What Nixon did (didn't kill anyone, but did crime).
Ford then pardon him, and evrybody said "how stupid, he cannot be charged anyway because he wasn't impeached"....
Of course during Senate Trump Impeachment Hearings II, Trump's lawyers assured us we didn't really need to convict him because he would still be liable for criminal prosecution after he left office. Guess they changed their minds.
Trump will slaughter only members that don't vote the way he tells them, and will not need any logic for doing that. If he become president, that will happen independently of the result of this case.
I lost contact and -- a few decades later -- reconnected with a high school friend thanks to Skype and he told me something that stuck with me. He worked for a consultant and saw his role as a mentor to new employees. Their job was to make assumptions, draw a conclusion, and write a report in support of the client. My friend told his mentees, "If I am not challenging your assumptions, I am not doing my job, and if you are not challenging my assumptions, you are not doing your job."
He remembered something others forget: nobody knows everything. Remember, and you act like my friend. Forget, and you're protecting your assumptions so they can't be challenged, which is why you believe in misinformation.
Based on stories I’ve see if you get vaccinated for Covid you become magnetic. But if you dump a glass of water on a magnet it loses its magnetism. So if you meet up with a person who got vaccinated and became magnetic the proper thing to do is dump a glass of water on them. I’m sure they will appreciate it.
Not sure dumb people can afford to be any dumber.
I've never had any illusions about liberals and, especially, progressives. They are addicted to their fake news too, it just concerns different things. Antivaxxing because vaccinations benefit Big Pharma instead of baby eating pizza joint conspiracies. That sort of thing.
There are individual leftists and maybe some far-left progressive organizations that attract some conspiracy-addled loons, antivaxxers, and the like, but they haven't assimilated the Democratic Party Borg-like the way this stuff has consumed the Republicans. RFK, Jr. and Marianne Williamson remain well-marginalized in Democratic politics despite some MSM efforts to make them appear relevant.
Google may not be our friend, but it has recently included 3 Kevin Drum items in its feed - after I had already read them, so I know I'm in its sights. Could be worse!
In the early days of Google, a researcher showed me the following quite remarkable fact:
For any given page on the web, it takes approximately 5 words typed into Google Search to isolate that specific piece of writing. We would often find a bunch of verbatim copies of it (link farming, or advertisement farming, etc, or sometimes just long quoting).
This has stuck with me, and I think it has everything to do with the result KD describes. Typing in very specific words into Google will get you very specific results - it says nothing about whether those results are true or not.
If you think about how these conspiracy theories work, they don't deny stuff, they create a new reality, with new terminology. You can't find out anything about them elsewhere, because nothing exists. The new terminology just drags right to that specific little nest of repetition and imitation.
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