On social media, users get cues that lead to mobbing and piling on, and fake accounts or automated \u2018bots\u2019 can give the illusion that vast crowds are impressed or outraged by a news.
The right and left may not agree on what constitutes misinformation, but both would like to see less of it on social media. And as the world faces the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the threat medical misinformation poses to public health remains real. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have a stake in cleaning up their platforms \u2014 without relying on censoring or fact-checking.
Censoring can engender distrust when social media companies expunge posts or delete accounts without explanation. It can even raise the profile of those who\u2019ve been \u201ccancelled.\u201d
And fact-checking isn\u2019t a good solution for complex scientific concepts. That\u2019s because science is not a set of immutable facts, but a system of inquiry that constructs provisional theories based on imperfect data.
A recent post on Politifact illustrates the problem. The claim at issue: a meme circulating on Facebook that viruses evolve to be less virulent. Politifact deemed it false, but Purdue University virologist David Sanders disagrees. \u201cI would say that it actually is true that viruses do tend to evolve to be less harmful to their host,\u201d he told me, though it\u2019s a process than can sometimes take decades \u2014 or even centuries \u2014 from the time a new virus jumps from animal to a human host. Sanders said Politifact had conflated virulence with other things, such as resistance to drugs. When a complex issue is still a matter of scientific uncertainty and debate, rating it \u201ctrue\u201d or \u201cfalse\u201d doesn\u2019t work very well.
Another limitation of fact-checking: There\u2019s so much dubious content floating around Facebook and Twitter that human fact checkers can only get to a miniscule fraction. Consumers may wrongly assume what\u2019s left over has been reviewed and is reliable.
\u201cIt\u2019s not a truth-seeking medium \u2014 it\u2019s meant for entertainment,\u201d says Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina in Canada.
But he is convinced that Facebook and Twitter can be made less deceptive by harnessing the analytical power of the human brain.
One way is to harness the phenomenon known as \u201cthe wisdom of the crowds.\u201d If you ask enough independent sources a tough question \u2014 like how deep the Pacific Ocean is at its deepest point \u2014 people converge on the right answer. But social media misguides our crowd-seeking compasses.
Crowdsourcing only works when each person is thinking independently. On social media, users get cues that lead to mobbing and piling on, and fake accounts or automated \u201cbots\u201d can give the illusion that vast crowds are impressed or outraged by a news item. \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily that [users] don\u2019t care about accuracy. But instead, it\u2019s that the social media context just distracts them and they forget to think about whether it\u2019s accurate or not before they decide to share it,\u201d said his research partner David Rand, a professor of management science and cognitive sciences at MIT.
Faye Flam
(As published in The Print)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On social media, users get cues that lead to mobbing and piling on, and fake accounts or automated \u2018bots\u2019 can give the illusion that vast crowds are impressed or outraged by a news.The right and left may not agree on what constitutes misinformation, but both would like to see less of it on social media. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}