Post by ck4829 on Dec 21, 2016 12:18:11 GMT
Confirmation bias is what encourages people to seek information consistent with their most fervently held beliefs rather than exploring new ideas. The choice we make about whether to watch Fox News or MSNBC can be explained by confirmation bias. We go to the news sources we do because we like having our views reinforced; because being exposed to facts that contradict our core beliefs is discomfiting. Reading information contrary to their beliefs makes some people very angry.
Looking for confirming facts can be complicated because there are so many sources of information out there these days. Today everyone has access to millions of online news stories from around the world. Thus, confirmation bias has become an ever more important and useful tool for avoiding dissonance.
Further complicating our contemporary information jungle is so-called fake news. Fake news has proliferated during the past year. Some fake news sources (e.g., The Onion) are pure satire. The satirical (and left-leaning) Borowitz Report recently ran this fake headline: "Putin Agrees To Receive Intelligence Briefings In Trump's Place." Funny, huh?
The political right also has its satirists, as this headline from Real News Right Now demonstrates: "Obama To Issue Executive Order Extending Presidential Term Limits." Funny, right? Unless you believe it, that is.
Other times, fake news is not at all funny. The recent pizzagate story offers an abject lesson. The core belief behind this notional conspiracy was that Hillary Clinton and other top Democratic operatives were involved in a child sex ring run out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. Unbelievable, right? Yet, this story was deemed credible by many people; some of them armed; some of them prominent.
The line between truth and fiction has been distorted out of all reason. We live in a post-truth world where wing-nut rumors can capture extensive audiences. Facebook, the prime example of our global connectedness, has spawned a trove of fake news this year.
Facebook is nothing like your local newspaper, yet millions of people get their daily news through it. Nearly half of Facebook's almost 1.8 billion members worldwide visit Facebook every day. That's a lot of eyeballs for advertisers and lots of opportunity to provide dubious content to readers.
A recent NPR interview with Craig Silverman, media editor for the website Buzzfeed, was a real education for me (Fresh Air: 14 December 2016). For the past several months, Silverman has tracked the rise of fake news websites that dominated mainstream media's outlets during the presidential campaign.
Silverman identified as many as 140 political news websites emanating from just one small town in Macedonia. This is not a fake news story! Many of these sites specialized in misleading, partisan and sometimes completely false stories. According to Silverman, most were run by teenagers and 20-something university students who realized they could make money by promoting pro-Trump and anti-Clinton disinformation.
They would have promoted Clinton and slammed Trump if there had been sufficient demand, but there wasn't. The Macedonians, Silverman said, created or copied fake stories and then posted them in pro-Trump Facebook groups where they were picked up and shared. Their interest was not ideological; it was purely financial.
Their road to fortune ran through Facebook but, as Silverman explained, it began with Google. Before Facebook existed, Google had launched a product called Google AdSense which allows anyone in the Google network to publish on their own websites, ads targeted to specific population segments.
The key to making money from Adsense is to drive more people to your website where they will see these Google-posted advertisements. This is where Facebook comes in. Clicking, commenting, liking and sharing stories on Facebook can generate traffic and ultimately revenue for the websites where the content - fake or real - is seen.
Your history of visiting websites says something about you, your values and biases. The more you visit partisan sites, the more likely you are to receive information about other sites sharing similar biases. This is a pattern that leads to a further hardening of views.
When citizens only read extreme partisan news; when they become unable to think critically about what they read; when they accept rumor, fakery and conspiracy as facts then communities, society and civility all suffer. People should never accept uncritically what they see online.
Let's resolve to shop around for our news next year - even if it makes us uncomfortable.
www.seacoastonline.com/news/20161220/observer-whats-news
Looking for confirming facts can be complicated because there are so many sources of information out there these days. Today everyone has access to millions of online news stories from around the world. Thus, confirmation bias has become an ever more important and useful tool for avoiding dissonance.
Further complicating our contemporary information jungle is so-called fake news. Fake news has proliferated during the past year. Some fake news sources (e.g., The Onion) are pure satire. The satirical (and left-leaning) Borowitz Report recently ran this fake headline: "Putin Agrees To Receive Intelligence Briefings In Trump's Place." Funny, huh?
The political right also has its satirists, as this headline from Real News Right Now demonstrates: "Obama To Issue Executive Order Extending Presidential Term Limits." Funny, right? Unless you believe it, that is.
Other times, fake news is not at all funny. The recent pizzagate story offers an abject lesson. The core belief behind this notional conspiracy was that Hillary Clinton and other top Democratic operatives were involved in a child sex ring run out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. Unbelievable, right? Yet, this story was deemed credible by many people; some of them armed; some of them prominent.
The line between truth and fiction has been distorted out of all reason. We live in a post-truth world where wing-nut rumors can capture extensive audiences. Facebook, the prime example of our global connectedness, has spawned a trove of fake news this year.
Facebook is nothing like your local newspaper, yet millions of people get their daily news through it. Nearly half of Facebook's almost 1.8 billion members worldwide visit Facebook every day. That's a lot of eyeballs for advertisers and lots of opportunity to provide dubious content to readers.
A recent NPR interview with Craig Silverman, media editor for the website Buzzfeed, was a real education for me (Fresh Air: 14 December 2016). For the past several months, Silverman has tracked the rise of fake news websites that dominated mainstream media's outlets during the presidential campaign.
Silverman identified as many as 140 political news websites emanating from just one small town in Macedonia. This is not a fake news story! Many of these sites specialized in misleading, partisan and sometimes completely false stories. According to Silverman, most were run by teenagers and 20-something university students who realized they could make money by promoting pro-Trump and anti-Clinton disinformation.
They would have promoted Clinton and slammed Trump if there had been sufficient demand, but there wasn't. The Macedonians, Silverman said, created or copied fake stories and then posted them in pro-Trump Facebook groups where they were picked up and shared. Their interest was not ideological; it was purely financial.
Their road to fortune ran through Facebook but, as Silverman explained, it began with Google. Before Facebook existed, Google had launched a product called Google AdSense which allows anyone in the Google network to publish on their own websites, ads targeted to specific population segments.
The key to making money from Adsense is to drive more people to your website where they will see these Google-posted advertisements. This is where Facebook comes in. Clicking, commenting, liking and sharing stories on Facebook can generate traffic and ultimately revenue for the websites where the content - fake or real - is seen.
Your history of visiting websites says something about you, your values and biases. The more you visit partisan sites, the more likely you are to receive information about other sites sharing similar biases. This is a pattern that leads to a further hardening of views.
When citizens only read extreme partisan news; when they become unable to think critically about what they read; when they accept rumor, fakery and conspiracy as facts then communities, society and civility all suffer. People should never accept uncritically what they see online.
Let's resolve to shop around for our news next year - even if it makes us uncomfortable.
www.seacoastonline.com/news/20161220/observer-whats-news