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What was fake on the Internet this week: Why this is the final column
- braythwayt 11y agoA sobering and sad read. The tl;dr is that modern hoaxes are manufactured to appeal to a demographic of society that either doesn’t care if they are hoaxes, or is so cognitively biased that they won’t believe evidence debunking the hoax. It’s the same mechanism behind denying evolution or climate change: Some people simply say that the “evidence” against their beliefs is manufactured by a conspiracy. We saw this is the false murder statistics shared by Donald Trump: People shared them widely because they confirmed their fears about blacks. When pinned down on the fact that the numbers were ridiculously wrong and that the source had been completely fabricated, they shrugged and said, “Well, its still useful to share because we need to have a conversation about the problem with black people in America.”
- tomaskafka 11y agoFacebook and other social networks are factories built to exploit these human biases and audiences on industrial scale. If you work in FB, TW, BuzzFeed et al and haven't questioned/fought this, you are responsible too.