[HN Gopher] Users post more falsehoods after others correct them...
___________________________________________________________________
Users post more falsehoods after others correct them: study
Author : rbanffy
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-05-25 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| avivo wrote:
| Note that the full story is far more complicated than this
| headline suggests. Some of the same authors show that "gently
| nudging users to think about accuracy increases quality of news
| shared".
|
| Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03344-2
|
| Tweet summary from PI of both studies:
| https://twitter.com/DG_Rand/status/1372217700626411527?s=20
| eplanit wrote:
| "they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and
| higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic
| language."
|
| Change the word "retweet" to "publish/broadcast", and that
| describes most "mainstream" journalism.
|
| I stopped when they referenced Snopes as a "fact checker"....the
| same Snopes that "fact-checked" a satirical article in the
| Babylon Bee about whether Brett Kavanaugh should prove via DNA
| that he's not the son of Hitler. [1]
|
| The authors should write an article on the more fundamental issue
| of 'truthiness' -- it was once a joke by Stephen Colbert, but now
| people actually talk in terms of "my truth" and "her truth" --
| not _the_ truth.
|
| If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even species?
| With objectivity lost, then they're surely unlikely to find its
| vestiges on Twitter.
|
| [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/democrats-demand-
| kavanaugh...
| ccn0p wrote:
| 2+2=5
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even
| species?
|
| Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender. All
| else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC" in the
| USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other Western
| countries.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Race is absolutely a state of mind, more so than gender.
|
| Yes ...
|
| > All else being equal, a person who would identify as "POC"
| in the USA would simply be seen as "white" in many other
| Western countries.
|
| I'm struggling to think of what you mean here? The 20th
| century saw the transition of various southern european
| ethnicities into being "white" where they might previously
| not have been. And also a brutal war in the ruins of
| Yugoslavia among ethnicities that outsiders would find hard
| to distinguish and label together as "white".
|
| Race is a state of mind - both in oneself _and in the eyes of
| other people_.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > I'm struggling to think of what you mean here?
|
| An example would be how a broadly non-American audience
| commented to a video entitled _" People Guess Who is White
| In a Group of Strangers"_ (though, to be fair, some
| Americans commenters were equally shocked) [0].
|
| You are absolutely right about the huge variety of ethnic
| identities and conflicts in different cultures, and how
| they cannot be understood under the mores of a different
| culture. That is the spirit of my comment, offering a
| counterpoint to the implication that the idea of "race" is
| somehow objective.
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ShitAmericansSay/comments/7d4a
| ff/sa...
| jb775 wrote:
| People on the left don't realize that the "fact checkers" are
| an extension of the propaganda arm of the left.
|
| For anyone who disagrees, take a look at the "fact-checker"
| Twitter profiles here and tell me with a straight face they
| aren't literal mouth puppets of the extreme left and/or the
| communist party: https://www.truthorfiction.com/our-team/
| tzs wrote:
| > I stopped when they referenced Snopes as a "fact
| checker"....the same Snopes that "fact-checked" a satirical
| article in the Babylon Bee about whether Brett Kavanaugh should
| prove via DNA that he's not the son of Hitler.
|
| Are you suggesting that when something that is false is being
| circulated as true, fact checkers should ignore it if it
| originated on a satire site?
| eplanit wrote:
| It's amazing how many people think that the Babylon Bee isn't
| satire, while there's little confusion over the Onion. Both
| state clearly that they're satire. Does Snopes fact-check the
| Onion? Do you think they should?
| tzs wrote:
| If an Onion article gets widely circulated on social media
| in such a way that people aren't realizing it is satire and
| people ask Snopes about it, then yes, they should do a fact
| check article on it stating that it was satire that
| originated at The Onion.
|
| > It's amazing how many people think that the Babylon Bee
| isn't satire, while there's little confusion over the
| Onion.
|
| I think there are a few things that contribute to this.
|
| 1. The way sharing works on many social media sites is that
| when you share a link to a story at some other site the
| social media site embeds the story in your post. It links
| back to the original site, but many people who see your
| post will just read the embedded story rather than click to
| go read it on the original site. They see the satirical
| article by itself rather than in the context of a whole
| site full of satirical articles, making it easier to not
| realize it is satire.
|
| 2. The Onion is more well known.
|
| 3. Due to things like Q, the Bee's satire is making claims
| that are often _less_ wild than things that people already
| believe, reducing the chances that they will realize it is
| satire.
| stirfish wrote:
| >If gender is a state of mind, then why not race, or even
| species?
|
| Why do you need gender and race to be objective?
|
| As for species, we've gotten that wrong too
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/019501958X
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I have seen quite a lot of "corrections" that are agonizingly
| smug technicalities, flaming strawmen, and the like. Those
| attempts to "debunk" whatever usually make me question what
| _else_ this group has been playing word-games about.
|
| Often, it comes with some intensity, then a completely
| hypocritical stance on something _else_ and again I wonder about
| the integrity.
|
| It can be done, but it must be done cleanly, unimpeachably, and
| with ground given when "your side" is wrong.
| nimih wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that this research was conducted by
| arguing with people on twitter via a bunch of automated bots.
| It's not really that surprising that people will [be slightly
| more likely to] double down if they notice that the person
| trying to talk them out of their beliefs is part of a legion of
| literal robots.
| ronsor wrote:
| Especially when those same groups already complain about bots
| invading their discussions.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > I have seen quite a lot of "corrections" that are agonizingly
| smug technicalities, flaming strawmen, and the like.
|
| I'm reminded of Paul Graham's _hierarchy of disagreement_.
| [0][1]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#Graha...
|
| [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The results remind me of the following passage from Dale
| Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People:
|
| Shortly after the close of World War I, I learned an invaluable
| lesson one night in London. I was manager at the time for Sir
| Ross Smith. During the war, Sir Ross had been the Australian ace
| out in Palestine; and shortly after peace was declared, he
| astonished the world by flying halfway around it in thirty days.
| No such feat had ever been attempted before. It created a
| tremendous sensation. The Australian government awarded him fifty
| thousand dollars; the King of England knighted him; and, for a
| while, he was the most talked-about man under the Union Jack. I
| was attending a banquet one night given in Sir Ross's honor; and
| during the dinner, the man sitting next to me told a humorous
| story which hinged on the quotation "There's a divinity that
| shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." The raconteur
| mentioned that the quotation was from the Bible. He was wrong. I
| knew that. I knew it positively. There couldn't be the slightest
| doubt about it. And so, to get a feeling of importance and
| display my superiority, I appointed myself as an unsolicited and
| unwelcome committee of one to correct him. He stuck to his guns.
| What? From Shakespeare? Impossible! Absurd! That quotation was
| from the Bible. And he knew it. The storyteller was sitting on my
| right; and Frank Gammond, an old friend of mine, was seated at my
| left. Mr. Gammond had devoted years to the study of Shakespeare.
| So the storyteller and I agreed to submit the question to Mr.
| Gammond. Mr. Gammond listened, kicked me under the table, and
| then said: "Dale, you are wrong. The gentleman is right. It is
| from the Bible." On our way home that night, I said to Mr.
| Gammond: "Frank, you knew that quotation was from Shakespeare."
| "Yes, of course," he replied, "Hamlet, Act Five, Scene Two. But
| we were guests at a festive occasion, my dear Dale. Why prove to
| a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not
| let him save his face? He didn't ask for your opinion. He didn't
| want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle." The
| man who said that taught me a lesson I'll never forget. I not
| only had made the storyteller uncomfortable, but had put my
| friend in an embarrassing situation. How much better it would
| have been had I not become argumentative.
| jb775 wrote:
| Apples to oranges. You providing this as an equivalent example
| to the current state of politics-based censorship is a more
| telling embodiment of the situation.
|
| The example here is demonstrably provable by pulling out a copy
| of Hamlet and flipping to Act Five, Scene Two. When Twitter
| shadow-bans accounts and hides hashtags of discussion they
| don't agree with politically, they aren't able to do this.
| Their thought process is clouded by the _illusion_ that they
| 're _positively_ not-wrong...but when questioned or presented
| with counter-evidence, they defer to Hitchens 's razor (a
| flawed methodology) and put wax in their ears.
| malloryerik wrote:
| An interesting and apropos passage, though it might be improved
| by a caveat that while the source of the Sir Ross' quote was an
| unimportant detail, falsehoods on Twitter are often both the
| primary content of a tweet and highly relevant to important
| social and political issues. Many tweets are outright
| slanderous.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| You will win more friends with a "never correct others" policy.
| However, what if belief in the misinformation has deadly
| consequences? Steve Jobs died due to him seeking "alternative"
| cancer treatment. Had someone convincing spoken up when
| acupuncture was being discussed around him, someone who changed
| his mind into recognizing that acupuncture is a sham, Jobs
| might still be alive.
| muffinman26 wrote:
| How To Win Friends and Influence People doesn't actually
| advocate never trying to convince people of an opposing
| viewpoint. Carnegie argues that you'll never be able to
| convince people of something by correcting them directly, but
| that you can persuade people if you express genuine interest
| in their opinion, listen well, ask questions, and allow the
| other person to save face by presenting the correction as
| something they came to on their own. Whereas, if you correct
| someone directly, no matter how solid your facts, they are
| more likely to feel attacked and double down.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > You will win more friends with a "never correct others"
| policy. However, what if belief in the misinformation has
| deadly consequences?
|
| where do you think the line should be drawn? dying is pretty
| clearly terrible.
|
| what if someone is going to invest all of their money in a
| ponzi scheme? or put 50% of their savings into GME? or invest
| in a high expense ratio index fund?
|
| we've got to ignore some mistakes and errors on the part of
| others.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| I'm glad you've decided to let me arbitrate this matter.
| Here is my official misinformation heuristic, three
| questions to ask oneself before acting:
|
| 1) Is this misinformation likely to convince and harm a
| great number of people?
|
| 2) Could belief in this misinformation result in severe
| health or emotional damage, for a single person or more who
| believe it?
|
| 3) If yes to either, are you an expert on the issue,
| relative to the person or group making the claim?
|
| If you're indeed an expert, try to save the person or
| people from their downfall.
|
| If you're not an expert, read up on the issue before
| meddling. God forbid it's _you_ who is wrong.
|
| And, of course, if no significant harm is likely, ignore
| it.
| raincom wrote:
| Great example. This is also an issue many doctors treating
| terminally ill patients. Of course, it is true that the patient
| will die in a month or two. What should a doctor do? Tell the
| truth to the patient to screw him emotionally? Or keep silent?
| Or lie to the patient?
| [deleted]
| ffggvv wrote:
| > The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in
| which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with
| links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets
| about politics.
|
| yeah i don't really trust or believe these "researchers". case
| and point from "fact checkers":
|
| https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/125626793122004992...
|
| https://twitter.com/GlennKesslerWP/status/139716616659076711...
|
| and snopes in particular is very biased. i remember when they
| labeled a claim by aoc as "factually untrue but morally correct"
| jjk166 wrote:
| I think we need to take a look at how we deal with the same issue
| in face to face interactions. Calling out someone who is
| incorrect in a group setting often goes poorly - you seem
| obnoxious and they need to double down on their rhetoric to save
| face. Even doing so "politely" just makes you seem more like a
| dick. While that may sound irrational, think about how you'd
| react at a conference where one person in the audience shouted
| "that's not true! this arcane reference which no one in the
| audience has evaluated claims that's just a myth!" in general
| you'd think they were at best misguided if not trying to be
| deliberately provocative. What are the odds that you would go
| home that night and look up the reference the heckler cited?
|
| Far more effective is to take someone aside and tell them in
| private that they are incorrect, especially when combined with
| acknowledgement of what they got right. In that context you are
| not attacking their social position and thus the stakes are
| lower. While it is hard to simulate such a position of privacy
| and trust in an online setting, private direct messages on most
| platforms are a good start. Anecdotally, people seem much more
| receptive to a respectful direct message and conversation seems
| much more cordial and focused on pursuit of knowledge. While I
| have no evidence that this leads to long term positive changes in
| posting behavior, I'd be willing to wager it has a better long
| term outcome.
| [deleted]
| slibhb wrote:
| Often "correcting falsehoods" is like trying to talk someone out
| of believing in God by explaining evolution. Or trying to argue
| with someone who believes in "systemic white supremacy" by
| pointing out that Asian-Americans earn more money than white
| Americans.
|
| I don't know what to do in these situations. You can't talk
| people out of their values but it is better when people express
| their values in a moderate way that aligns with empirical facts.
| Probably there's some polite way to express your disagreement
| without saying "actually here's why you're wrong".
| enriquto wrote:
| The Socratic method is good for that. Instead of saying "you
| are wrong", you ask a series of questions that induce a
| contradiction in the other person. This is often deemed as
| trolling or sealioning when the discussion is unwelcome (which
| often is), but when people are open-minded it is a respectful
| way to argue.
| deathanatos wrote:
| This is way harder than it sounds. You can ask the followup
| questions, but too often, they'll get answered.
| Contradictions, even pointed out, aren't contradictions _to
| them_. Hitting a contradiction in the first place requires
| that the person being questioned applies a consistent model
| to the questions, and most of the time, they 're not. And
| getting over that requires admitting that they're wrong.
|
| When I am relating such conversations to my SO, it's often
| with the (modified) phrase "you can drown a horse in water,
| but you can't force it to drink."
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm one of those who call Socrates a troll. The problem isn't
| just that it's unwelcome but that it's unproductive. It
| proves only that the person isn't capable of supporting their
| own premise, not that the premise is wrong. It doesn't lead
| to truths on its own, and doesn't point in the direction of
| improved hypotheses.
|
| Socrates then makes the assertion that he knows nothing, and
| is therefore immune to such treatment (and is thus superior).
| He's not putting himself on the line -- exactly the kind of
| thing that trolls do.
|
| If Socrates asks you what "virtue" is, what can you say
| except, "I dunno. Why are you asking? What is it you actually
| want to know?"
|
| Modern Socratic method isn't really all that similar to what
| Socrates actually did. It's intended to be cooperative,
| rather than adversarial. It's nominally based on the dialogue
| in Meno, which is really more about epistemology than about
| pedagogy (and which draws Socrates to some weird conclusions
| about past lives).
|
| Even so, it's not really meant to be argumentation. It's not
| between equals. The teacher leads the student to "discover"
| the truth that the teacher already knows. Not just knows, but
| knows so thoroughly that they can guide the student around
| all of the possible mis-steps.
|
| I'm all for respectful dialogue, but that's not really what
| either Socrates nor the modern pedagogues who take
| inspiration from him are doing. I'll be honest that I've got
| disagreements with the notion of respectful dialogue as well,
| but they're off-topic here.
| enriquto wrote:
| > It proves only that the person isn't capable of
| supporting their own premise, not that the premise is
| wrong. It doesn't lead to truths on its own,
|
| But that's the only we can aspire to! Any statement exists
| because somebody is stating it. You cannot really "have" a
| truth that is not held by anybody; that means that you
| still have to find it. The Socratic method thus serves to
| find a person that is able to hold a certain premise, by
| sieving away all the people who are not. Notice that this
| does not yet mean than the premise is true, but it is a
| necessary condition.
|
| > and doesn't point in the direction of improved
| hypotheses.
|
| I do not know of any systematic method that does that. Do
| you? It seems to be a purely creative, not inductive,
| process.
|
| Regarding the "trollishness" character of Socrates I agree
| with you. If Socrates was born again today, we (the
| society) would kill him again.
| stirfish wrote:
| > Or trying to argue with someone who believes in "systemic
| white supremacy" by pointing out that Asian-Americans earn more
| money than white Americans.
|
| White Supremacy is the belief that white people are inherently
| superior to everyone else and should dominate, regardless of
| how much money anyone makes. There are plenty of poor white
| supremacists.
|
| Did you mean systemic social privilege?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_privilege
|
| >I don't know what to do in these situations.
|
| Empathy and understanding.
| slibhb wrote:
| This is what I meant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sup
| remacy#Academic_use_o...
| stirfish wrote:
| > The term white supremacy is used in some academic studies
| of racial power to denote a system of structural or
| societal racism which privileges white people over others,
| regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred.
| According to this definition, white racial advantages occur
| at both a collective and an individual level (ceteris
| paribus, i. e., when individuals are compared that do not
| relevantly differ except in ethnicity). Legal scholar
| Frances Lee Ansley explains this definition as follows:
|
| >By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the
| self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I
| refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system
| in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material
| resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white
| superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations
| of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily
| reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social
| settings.
|
| This makes sense to me, and doesn't seem related to how
| much money Asian Americans make.
|
| Have you heard of redlining? It might make "systemic white
| supremacy" make more sense in an American context. If
| you've heard of Martin Luther King Jr, this is why he was
| assassinated.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
| 3np wrote:
| What are the odds that the Twitter accounts that the researchers
| base their findings on were also bots? It's an interesting
| thought to entertain with intertwined mutual feedback loops of
| assisted automated systems all assuming each other to be human.
| [deleted]
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Massive global communities were a mistake. We're not cut out for
| them.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Whenever Bernie Sanders or some other highly polarizing
| politician makes some sweeping claim, I have found that comments
| can be effective,such as on Reddit, for at least setting the
| record strait or putting it in the correct context or showing
| counterexamples.
| jb775 wrote:
| The actual issue is that 90% of "falsehoods" aren't proven as
| false by the WOKE gatekeepers of modern discussion...but with
| certainty, they label and dismiss them as "falsehoods" when the
| cognitive dissonance of their personal politics kicks in.
|
| Then they say "the burden of proof lies on you", but considering
| that digging up proof on these types of things (in the short
| term) often relies on further discussion and research, it's kind
| of a catch-22 to continue the debate.
|
| _Latest case in point:_ Covid was a super-virus created in a lab
| with funding personally approved by Fauci (who is now enriching
| himself from the debacle)....and made it 's way out of the lab
| and into the general population.
|
| _Next case in point:_ The 2020 election machines actually were
| hacked, and results were tampered with. Gasp! Censor that wrong-
| think!
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _the researchers observed that the accuracy of news sources the
| Twitter users retweeted promptly declined by roughly 1 percent in
| the next 24 hours after being corrected_
|
| How do you measure accuracy in single digit percents? That seems
| impossibly precise.
| playpause wrote:
| Maybe it's aggregated. If someone retweets seven stories, and
| four are deemed 'accurate', that's about 57%.
| zksmk wrote:
| Before: 100 users, 100 accurate retweets.
|
| After: 100 users, 99 accurate retweets.
|
| The study followed 2000 and I can only assume they all
| retweeted multiple times, like 10, so you get 20000 retweets.
| Seems plausible to me.
| floxy wrote:
| This is essentially a textbook example from
|
| Chapter 5 of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
|
| http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...
|
| "...The new information D is: 'Mr. N has gone on TV with a
| sensational claim that a commonly used drug is unsafe', and three
| viewers, Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C, see this. Their prior
| probabilities P(S|I) that the drug is safe are (0.9, 0.1, 0.9),
| respectively; i.e. initially, Mr. A and Mr. C were believers in
| the safety of the drug, Mr. B a disbeliever. But they interpret
| the information D very differently, because they have different
| views about the reliability of Mr. N. They all agree that, if the
| drug had really been proved unsafe, Mr. N would be right there
| shouting it: that is, their probabilities P(D|SI) are (1, 1, 1);
| but Mr. A trusts his honesty while Mr. C does not. Their
| probabilities P(D|SI) that, if the drug is safe, Mr. N would say
| that it is unsafe, are (0.01, 0.3, 0.99), respectively.
|
| ...
|
| Put verbally, they have reasoned as follows:
|
| A) - Mr. N is a fine fellow, doing a notable public service. I
| had thought the drug to be safe from other evidence, but he would
| not knowingly misrepresent the facts; therefore hearing his
| report leads me to change my mind and think that the drug is
| unsafe after all. My belief in safety is lowered by 20.0 db, so I
| will not buy any more.
|
| B) - Mr. N is an erratic fellow, inclined to accept adverse
| evidence too quickly. I was already convinced that the drug is
| unsafe; but even if it is safe he might be carried away into
| saying otherwise. So,hearing his claim does strengthen my
| opinion, but only by 5.3 db. I would never under any
| circumstances use the drug.
|
| C) - Mr. N is an unscrupulous rascal, who does everything in his
| power to stir up trouble by sensational publicity. The drug is
| probably safe, but he would almost certainly claim it is unsafe
| whatever the facts. So hearing his claim has practically no
| effect (only 0.005 db) on my confidence that the drug is safe. I
| will continue to buy it and use it."
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I'd question if the abruptly clipped nature of the conversational
| medium (twitter) leads automatically to more defensive responses.
| Some of these communication tools lack completely the nuances of
| human to human conversation.
|
| For example, Pre-COVID, you are having a nice cup of Joe with a
| chocolate cake at a local coffeshop, sitting in your favorite
| chair. You happen to engage in a conversational with a stranger,
| but someone with whom the conversation was intriguing, albeit,
| completely out of your regular circle.
|
| If the stranger, with an attentive face and no negative emotions,
| in a stable voice, provides some completely contrary information
| to something you think that you know how might you take it?
|
| Now, as a thought exercise, instead imagine the same as a simple
| blurb on twitter. No context, bereft of humanity, no
| communication that this person is a friend, enemy, or merely
| reposting talking points from whichever biases newsmedia they
| follow.
|
| Would you think that the latter would be more likely to result in
| a negative response, only from the medium difference (and what it
| lacks)?
| goalieca wrote:
| > Not only is misinformation increasing online
|
| I am really starting to despise this word because it is so very
| imprecise. Yes, there are cases where people are making up facts
| to support and influence but very seldom do even the experts make
| statements with scientific precision and nuance that some topics
| deserve. This word is often being used to politically dismiss any
| opinion you don't agree with.
| hashkb wrote:
| Across the board, correcting and confronting people, no matter
| how you do it, leads them to double down, in most cases. Source:
| reality.
| gadders wrote:
| Here's the paper:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411764.3445642
|
| Here's the Snopes "debunking" of one of the claims:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ukraine-clinton-foundation...
|
| I wouldn't call that unequivocal. Snopes re-wrote the original
| claim to say it was referring to the Ukrainian Government, and
| then said it was false. (The tweet did make some other claims,
| but they were discussed in a separate article).
|
| I think if you're going to convince people, maybe use a fact-
| source that matches their political leanings.
| [deleted]
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Surprised to see that the article makes no mention of the closely
| related _backfire effect_ in psychology. From [0]:
|
| > _given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the
| evidence and believe even more strongly._
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#backfire_eff...
| jaredwiener wrote:
| No one wants to be fact checked.
|
| https://blog.nillium.com/fighting-misinformation-online/
| jsight wrote:
| > Among other findings, the researchers observed that the
| accuracy of news sources the Twitter users retweeted promptly
| declined by roughly 1 percent in the next 24 hours after being
| corrected.
|
| 1 percent? How do you measure a 1 percent decline in news source
| quality? This sentence throws doubt at the whole idea, IMO.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| The paper is online:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411764.3445642
|
| > To measure users' subsequent behavior after receiving the
| correc- tion, we focused on three main outcome variables. Most
| importantly, we considered the quality of news content shared
| by the users. We quantifed the quality of news content at the
| source level using trust- worthiness scores of news domains
| shared by the users based on a list of 60 news domains rated by
| professional fact-checkers (this list contains 20 fake news, 20
| hyperpartisan, and 20 mainstream news outlets where each domain
| has a quality score between 0 and 1) [39]. A link-containing
| (re)tweet's quality score was defned as the quality of the
| domain that was linked to. (Quality scores could not be
| assigned to tweets without links to any of the 60 sites.)
|
| Citation [39] is Pennycook,G. & Rand,D.G. "Fighting
| misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of
| news source quality." I am not sure what "crowdsourced" means
| here because I didn't read all the citations.
|
| But it sounds like they have a plausible metric. It's always
| very dumb to criticize science based on a press release.
| jsight wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are arguing here. Do you think 1% is a
| significant finding? What was the margin of error?
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I don't really know if it's a significant finding. My point
| was that you asked "how you measure a 1 percent decline in
| news source quality?" and suggested that your personal
| confusion about such a thing throws the entire paper into
| question. Instead of having such strong judgments, why not
| just read the paper?
|
| I am personally not sure how astronomers measure
| gravitational redshift with such apparent accuracy. But my
| ignorance does not mean astronomers are a bunch of frauds.
| It means I haven't done the required reading.
| jsight wrote:
| Doubt is not a strong judgement. I was hoping someone had
| the details and would clarify. I appreciate that you did
| that as you've turned my doubt into certainty. They did
| not precisely measure a 1% change in news source quality.
| PeterisP wrote:
| In essence, don't feed the trolls, ignore them.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in
| which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with
| links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets
| about politics.
|
| I wonder if it would be different if it had come from someone
| they knew in real life. I guess I shouldn't be at this point, but
| I'm always surprised that the people posting the misinformation
| aren't terribly embarrassed about it when it's revealed.
|
| > "We might have expected that being corrected would shift one's
| attention to accuracy. But instead, it seems that getting
| publicly corrected by another user shifted people's attention
| away from accuracy -- perhaps to other social factors such as
| embarrassment."
|
| > "Future work should explore how to word corrections in order to
| maximize their impact, and how the source of the correction
| affects its impact,"
|
| I think this is important work, but I'm pessimistic about
| anything that will really be effective.
| jerf wrote:
| "We might have expected that being corrected would shift one's
| attention to accuracy."
|
| Really? Who would think that? Science requires an open mind,
| sure, but it doesn't require you to be some sort of idiot when
| formulating your hypotheses. To a first approximation, nobody
| responds to being corrected with a polite thank you and a shift
| to focus on accuracy, and everybody knows that.
|
| Whatever model of humanity they're operating with is less
| realistic than _homo econimus_. Are they using _homo vulcanus_?
| jsight wrote:
| Exactly... I find that a lot of the folks posting the most
| misinformation have basically zero interest in whether it
| actually is true.
| jerf wrote:
| That's excessively specific. Most people, no further
| qualifiers, have zero interest in whether what they are
| posting is actually true. Most people are just socially
| signalling their preferred in group by what news they
| propagate. Labeling things "misinformation" is just another
| dodge for having to engage with whether or not something is
| true, or has a grain of truth in it that you might not
| like.
| bnralt wrote:
| > I guess I shouldn't be at this point, but I'm always
| surprised that the people posting the misinformation aren't
| terribly embarrassed about it when it's revealed.
|
| When things become hyperpartisan, people can't see this
| revelation. When people read articles like this, I wouldn't be
| surprised if the reaction is mostly "Yes, I can't believe those
| people who disagree with me do this," and not a reflection on
| their own behavior.
|
| You can see this if you follow any political argument online.
| No one believes that the someone on an opposing side could have
| a valid argument, or could correctly point out their mistake.
| If a third-party observer tries to point out a mistake, people
| will usually cast them as the enemy and accuse them of
| spreading falsehoods.
|
| Walter Lippmann's excellent Public Opinion points out how it's
| difficult for people to be both interested in a topic and
| neutral. This excerpt touches on the issue:
|
| > "It has been said" writes Walter Bagehot, [Footnote: On the
| Emotion of Conviction, Literary Studies, Vol. Ill, p. 172.]
| "that if you can only get a middleclass Englishman to think
| whether there are 'snails in Sirius,' he will soon have an
| opinion on it. It will be difficult to make him think, but if
| he does think, he cannot rest in a negative, he will come to
| some decision. And on any ordinary topic, of course, it is so.
| A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a
| complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither has any
| doubt whatever."
| Nursie wrote:
| It's very tempting, as in your insightful quote there, to
| form opinions on everything. However it would be nice if more
| of us said "I don't have enough information to have an
| informed opinion here" more often.
|
| And I include myself in that.
|
| (Edit - yes I am a middle class Englishman!)
| jfengel wrote:
| I'd point out that Bagehot wrote that in 1871. People don't
| change, though communications media sure do.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > I wonder if it would be different if it had come from someone
| they knew in real life. I guess I shouldn't be at this point,
| but I'm always surprised that the people posting the
| misinformation aren't terribly embarrassed about it when it's
| revealed.
|
| That's an interesting possibility, and I have a small anecdote
| in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that is slightly
| related.
|
| My mother, at the older end of the lately maligned "boomer"
| generation, would often rant with me on the phone about how
| obviously fake or ridiculous hoaxes were being spread on
| WhatsApp groups that she participated in. Even though she
| doesn't have a scientific background, she has a good instinct
| for the general ideas and how science works, and a very well-
| honed bullshit detector. After a while, maybe out of lockdown
| boredom, she started refuting the hoaxes when she could find
| good sources or science-based arguments to do so... and
| eventually, some of her friends and acquaintances who _did_
| tend to fall for false information, now ask her beforehand if
| something they have just been shared makes sense or not!
|
| Note however that this is not in the US, so at least she
| doesn't have to contend with overarching partisan identity
| lines regarding belief in this or that.
| bombcar wrote:
| The US political lines make this horribly hard to do unless
| you ACTUALLY know the participants well - just take a look at
| the HN thread about the electric F150 to see acres of people
| unwilling to even consider that someone could own a pickup
| truck without being "in the wrong group".
| yorwba wrote:
| > I'm always surprised that the people posting the
| misinformation aren't terribly embarrassed about it when it's
| revealed.
|
| Alternatively, the _people_ posting misinformation were
| terribly embarrassed, posting less on Twitter as a result,
| while the _bots_ kept posting at their original schedule, thus
| decreasing average quality as a result.
|
| The paper seems to be lacking information about absolute tweet
| counts, so it's hard to tell what the change in their relative
| measures means in practice.
| joering2 wrote:
| My impression from being on twitter daily, is that some
| people (plenty) love to play stupid on Twitter, never mind
| their wisdom. I mean I find pilots, neurosurgeons, C-level
| execs, Harvard grads, etc, acting ridiculous, mostly related
| to politics but not only. I think its as pure trollism as it
| can get. And they never learn - I see someone laying down
| facts, using reason, logic etc.. then they are back spewing
| lies the next day. If you wanna turn the nicest person into a
| monster, just leave them on twitter for a week or two.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > I wonder if it would be different if it had come from someone
| they knew in real life. I guess I shouldn't be at this point,
| but I'm always surprised that the people posting the
| misinformation aren't terribly embarrassed about it when it's
| revealed.
|
| Anecdotally, they don't see it as truth being revealed, but me
| being "brainwashed", a "linear thinker" or "slave to
| orthodoxy."
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| I think this an extremely important topic. But I don't think it's
| so much THAT users are corrected, as it is HOW users are
| corrected.
|
| > To conduct the experiment, the researchers first identified
| 2,000 Twitter users, with a mix of political persuasions, who had
| tweeted out any one of 11 frequently repeated false news
| articles. All of those articles had been debunked by the website
| Snopes.com.
|
| And here lies the issue. We don't "correct" the issue with a
| discussion out of genuine curiosity, we "correct" the issue by
| making an appeal to authority. Like the XKCD #386 comic, we're an
| obsessive dog licking at it's wounds -- we can't go to sleep.
| Someone is wrong.
|
| I haven't encountered a single "Flat Earther". I have encountered
| one genuinely "anti-vaxer". But the way the discussion goes on
| the internet, I'd expect they're behind every tree.
|
| When people rush over with a link on "Snopes", and then smugly
| sit back thinking, "Checkmate" -- it worsens the issue. The
| reason it makes matters worse is because we're acting like Dwight
| Schrute: "False. CNN has not purchased an industrial washing
| machine to put a spin on stories. News stories cannot be placed
| inside a washing machine."
| DSingularity wrote:
| Isnt this obvious? We live in a hyper-connected world where
| sentiments can take a dive in a minute when something starts
| trending. We also live in a world where every well-funded
| organization has a propaganda arm.
|
| Take Israeli propagandists as an example. What do you think
| happens when a hashtag like #SheikhJarrah starts getting
| attention and activity measured in the thousands per hour? You
| think they will just ignore these threads? Of course not. Troll
| networks get notified. Volunteers in all kinds of pro-Israeli
| organizations are mobilized and directed to specific
| conversations. Suddenly, it seems like every active thread is
| getting attacked by personalities each responding with very
| similar claims and very similar approaches.
|
| I believe this happens across the board and not just with
| political/ideological issues. You are not going to have an online
| platform allowing people to share information widely without
| attracting the interests of propagandists eager to
| improve/maintain the images of their clients.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Any form of refutation can be taken by conspiracists as evidence
| of the conspiracy.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Lecturing people doesn't work because there is no trust.
|
| We should not assume that authority derived from credentials or
| the use of factually supported logic is sufficient to convince,
| without trust it is merely anecdotical.
| godshatter wrote:
| Maybe the world has changed but when someone says something
| stupid and someone else calls them on it, backing it up with
| facts, and they double down on the stupid... shouldn't there be a
| population of people out there that see this as a desperation
| move on the part of the original poster? Or a sign of closed-
| mindedness?
|
| Correcting someone in a public venue isn't for the audience of
| one that is spouting stupid things, it's for the rest of the
| world that is reading the thread. So a fact-based correction that
| causes more stupid to be posted is doing it's job, really.
|
| If the response happens to reference the facts that were posted,
| well, now you've got a conversation going.
|
| I would also like to point out that stupid is in the eye of the
| beholder sometimes. Something can sound stupid on first blush yet
| turn out to be true.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Maybe the world has changed but when someone says something
| stupid and someone else calls them on it, backing it up with
| facts, and they double down on the stupid... shouldn't there be
| a population of people out there that see this as a desperation
| move on the part of the original poster?
|
| Did you miss the entire Trump presidency? People _love_ that
| sort of thing. Facts are difficult, inscrutable things that
| have to be dug out of observations and carefully safeguarded.
| They often tend to be disappointing. Whereas lies and
| fantasies? Those are _theatre_.
|
| Oh, and algorithmic timelines make this worse: correcting
| someone is promoting their original views to other people.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The problem is that there is too much information. For
| (almost) any position, there are some facts that support that
| position. There are other facts that oppose the position. The
| _evidence_ (the sum of all the facts) often leans one way or
| the other - either supporting or opposing the position. But
| someone arguing in bad faith can often find enough facts to
| look somewhat convincing, which lets them persuade at least
| some others that their position is correct.
| HPsquared wrote:
| See the 1% rule:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
|
| The vast majority of people are lurkers and only read the
| content.
| Nursie wrote:
| It's certainly a sign of closed mindedness.
|
| AFAICT most discussion on the internet is pretty closed-minded
| though, people have their preconceptions, and they argue them.
| Rarely is anyone enlightened, or are minds changed. It is
| common to see such a person be corrected on a point of fact but
| then go on to repeat the same falsehood in another place or on
| another day. This is likely because to them the narrative is
| important, the emotions, rather than correctness.
|
| > Correcting someone in a public venue isn't for the audience
| of one that is spouting stupid things, it's for the rest of the
| world that is reading the thread.
|
| I hope so, but I'm not sure it works like that either, as the
| legions of spouters seem to grow by the day :/
| everdrive wrote:
| I think a lot of people can't see through the noise. Find a
| video of two pundits arguing, and I guarantee that you can find
| videos which alternately claim that each side "destroyed" the
| other. It's not just that people can't integrate all the
| different information out there. (this is part of the problem,
| too, of course) Frankly, I think we have underestimated the
| degree (or at least I underestimated it quite a bit) to which
| many people never really understand the validity of an
| argument, but simply adopt it when it becomes "mainstream." Of
| course the problem now is that there is not really a
| "mainstream." There are many small competing and conflicting
| "mainstreams." And so people adopt many of these ideas.
| Verdex wrote:
| It's even worse than that. I went to a evolution vs
| creationism debate once when I was in college (it was put on
| for the students there). Everyone in that auditorium was an
| atheist and everyone was a young earth creationist. The
| difference was in which speaker had just made a really good
| _sounding_ point.
|
| The people on the extremes each believe that their side won
| but as far as I could tell all the people in the middle
| believed in both as they crossed some "sufficiently cool"
| threshold.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Reasoning takes effort and people are lazy. So why not listen
| to my favorite <insert individual of note in society>. /s
|
| IMO, it sounds like a lack of critical thinking skills.
| Instead of pondering validity, as one does to "think
| critically," as you stated, some people adopt a line of
| thought from their authority (be it a pastor at church,
| Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow/etc on TV, POTUS, news outlets,
| etc).
| mgh2 wrote:
| "Truth is so obscure these times, and falsehood so established,
| that unless we love the truth, we cannot know it." - Blaise
| Pascal
|
| Unfortunately, the odds are against us. Lying is inherent in
| human nature. Even if you point out the facts, most people will
| be deluded again because the majority drowns everything,
| especially in an anonymous environment such as the internet.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| But what are the facts? WMDs in Iraq and the myriad of other
| lies our governments throw at us. Fool me once shame on you.
| Fool me ten thousand times and shame on everyone.
| orev wrote:
| Something missing in this type of analysis is the future
| actions of the person being corrected. One might say something
| wrong, be corrected, then argue (because being corrected makes
| you feel bad and angry). But the _next_ time they say
| something, they might consider it more, or maybe not be as
| extreme, as they want to avoid the bad feelings caused by
| negative feedback.
|
| It's easy to see this in action on this very site -- nobody
| likes to be downvoted, so the conversations stay somewhat more
| civil than other sites.
| throwaway803453 wrote:
| Often the words "I, you, my, your" are as bad as swear words
| when correcting someone. One sure way to anger someone and have
| the double down is to hurt their ego by using one of those
| words (e.g., your code has a bug, vs the code has a bug). Avoid
| those words and disagreements become a lot more productive.
| [deleted]
| tryonenow wrote:
| >Yes, in some ways. A new study shows Twitter users post even
| more misinformation after other users correct them.
|
| I can't help but feel like the academics studying this "problem"
| are blinded by hubris. Even the byline is exemplary - what's
| being described is a _discussion_.
|
| When you gatekeep science in the public square with "fact
| checking" you inevitably end up with a politicized orthodoxy. The
| opinions and majority consensus of our academic institutions are
| not beyond reproach, and there have repeatedly been instances
| where the messaging was misleading or false - look no further
| than the discourse surrounding covid starting early last year.
| Latest example being the lab origin hypothesis - a cooky, right
| wing, xenophobic conspiracy theory, until it wasn't. Fortunately
| media outlets are finally backtracking on their politicized "fact
| checking" in this case: see the editor's note here [0] for
| example.
|
| 0. https://www.vox.com/2020/3/4/21156607/how-did-the-
| coronaviru...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-25 23:01 UTC)