23 ms·

Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

133 points by mpweiher 6y ago

bondarchuk 6y ago
Given that political discourse so often takes the form of "I am right and you are wrong", it's easy to foresee that tools to prevent the sharing of misinformation will in practice end up as tools to prevent the sharing of information from people the wielder of the tool disagrees with. Then, it's just another propaganda arms race between the information sharing and information dissemination technologists of both sides. I think this is not the kind of research that will ultimately lead to a more healthy public debate.
- yorwba 6y ago
  But the tool in the article is to ask people whether they think a certain headline is accurate and then looking at the effect that has on their sharing of other articles. If someone with the "I am right and you are wrong" mindset shares fewer articles they think are not accurate, they'll actually be right more often. (At least in their own opinion.) If this gets weaponized to make people on "both sides" pay more attention to the accuracy of what they're sharing, I'd expect that to result in a more healthy public debate.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The researchers anticipate that concern, and specifically checked whether "information vs. misinformation" just boiled down to partisan disputes about what's true. They found that "our participants were more than twice as likely to consider sharing false but politically concordant headlines (37.4%) as they were to rate such headlines as accurate", suggesting that there really is a problem of people sharing things they know aren't strictly accurate.
- Natsu 6y ago
  Another part of the problem is that you cannot unring a bell. For example, the WaPo issued a retraction yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-investigator/2021/01/09/7a55c7fa-51cf-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-i... The headline quotes from their original story were proven wrong when deleted audio of the call was recovered: https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-to-georgia-lead-investigator-reveals-new-details-11615411561 https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-t... But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_final.pdf https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_... This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter of great importance that injected false information into it. Information that was somehow 'confirmed' by several other publications relying on their own anonymous sources.
  - tomComb 6y ago
    There is no perfect solution here, but at least they had to publicly acknowledge their error. This is much better than with the sources most people use. I often see people say 'hey look at this terrible thing WaPo or NYT did' as an excuse for reading whatever garbage source is saying exactly what they want to hear. It's not all of nothing.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      Indeed, you can cherry pick individual examples of inaccurate reporting from literally any media outlet. It seems suspicious to me that this commenter picked out a story criticising the right that had some innacuracies when it's largely media outlets on the right that have a history of actually repeatedly reporting outright lies in recent history (see Fox, OAN, Newsmax etc).
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    They did not issue a retraction. They issued a correction. The precise language of the call is different, but the core of the reporting is unchanged. The precise differences are that, what was quoted as "find the fraud" was actually find "dishonesty", and you'll "a national hero" was actually that you have "the most important job in the country right now". This doesn't change the overall story: Trump attempted to reach out to GA election officials and push them to overturn election results. > But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: None of the citations on page 10 reference this reporting or any of the quotes attributed to Trump on this call.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      Not sure why you're being downvoted, the differences from the reporting and the actual call are exactly the sorts of differences you'd expect if their anonymous source was someone who had heard the call once and was conveying the wording based off of memory. There's no significant difference in meaning as far as I can tell - Trump was still instructing them to find him votes.
    - 6y ago
- dfay 6y ago
  You should carefully read the paper linked. Your comment may be correct but it's not a valid criticism of the methods the study used.
- s17n 6y ago
  What does this have to do with the article?
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  This article focuses entirely on people regulating their own decisions to share an article, not any attempt by a "tool wielder" to selectively block any content. To put their study into context, it suggests that if Facebook asked users to rate whether an unrelated article was accurate before allowing you to share their own, many people would pay attention to whether their own articles were accurate, and less misinformation would be shared. This could be applied universally to any news article, both for detecting people sharing it, and populating the pre-share accuracy judgement. Instead, Facebook streamlines the process to increase engagement, and people blitz through it without stopping to consider the article's accuracy at all, distracted by thinking of all the likes they'll get for posting it. According to the study, when users are already primed to judge the accuracy of an article, they are more likely to self-regulate their own misinformation.
  - didibus 6y ago
    Absolutely, what more, and I'm culpable of this too, often things are re-shared where you only read the headline, or even just skimmed through the article barely reading it or spending any time to think through it.
- rediguanayum 6y ago
  I don't think debate is the issue. The issue is people lying to each other to motivate certain problematic behavior like riots and elections. Moreover the echo chamber effect created by the information sharing technologists to increase clicks, makes having a meaningful debate moot.
Kapura 6y ago
What does it matter if you have a manager, or your manager has a manager, who will approve or disapprove a new disinfo policy based on whether or not it affects specific political groups? A fish rots from the head.
thepasswordis 6y ago
Unfortunately "accuracy" has been recoded to "insurrectionist". Take for instance the recent retraction published by the washington post about Trumps interaction with the Georgia Secretary of State pressuring him to "find votes". People pay close attention to the news pointed out the misinformation that WaPo was peddling, and how dangerous it was, and those people were called every mean name in the book. Eventually those people will just stop pointing out the innacuracies in reporting.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  We all heard the actual audio of that call, and he absolutely was pressuring the secretary of state to find votes. So while WAPO got inaccurate quotes the content of the call was absolutely "insurrectionist".
  - thepasswordis 6y ago
    Do you see what you are doing right here? You're leaving out the context to make a political point. Yes, he was asking the SoS to "find votes". However, the claim was: "We believe that there may be over 100k votes which could fail signature verification, and we only need you to find several thousand of them, a small fraction of what we believe you will find." That is very different than what both you and the WaPo implied. The claim is related to signature verification. So argue with that if you don't agree with it. But that isn't what happened.
    - mpweiher 6y ago
      That is absolutely within the bounds of the generic "find me the votes". There is always some pretext for finding those votes.
    - btilly 6y ago
      He didn't just want her to find votes that can fail signature verification, he wanted her to look for them in specific areas that vote heavily Democratic. Which means that he was not asking her to validate that people voted accurately, he was asking her to slip her thumbs on the scales and make the vote come out his way. That is why he "needed" her to do so. Because he wanted the vote to come to the result that he wanted, and not the result that reflected the actual will of the voters.
saas_sam 6y ago
Nature retracted a peer-reviewed paper last November after pressure from those with a particular political/ideological bent. You can read the details here and decide for yourself if their reasoning is valid for the retraction. Did not seem very valid to me personally, especially given they did not retract the authors' prior work using similar methods (but with a conclusion the aforementioned political actors would find most pleasing, rather than upsetting): https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/21/nature-communications-retracts-much-criticized-paper-on-mentorship/ https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/21/nature-communications...
- jberryman 6y ago
  Why are you grinding your axe in this thread? Totally irrelevant to TFA
  - saas_sam 6y ago
    I think skepticism of the source's authoritativeness on the subject of information-filtering is perfectly relevant to TFA. But you are free to disagree and downvote if you want to punish me further.
mclanett 6y ago
What I find both amusing and frustrating is that the linked article uses the word "accuracy" 110 times but never explains what is meant by it. For example in the headline "Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests", what is meant by rating for accuracy? Is it the number 500 and whether it is low, exact, or high? Is it whether the people were migrants? Is it whether the vests were explosive? Is it whether the story is in any way truthful? I really have no idea. Is "accuracy" an alias for "truthful" or something else? The article doesn't explain.
- yorwba 6y ago
  From the article: Participants were randomly assigned to then either judge the veracity of each headline (accuracy condition) or indicate whether they would consider sharing each headline online (sharing condition) So they use "accuracy" as an alias for "veracity". But they don't really need to define it, because the study is about what the participants think is accurate, not the researchers. EDIT: Now that I've made it down to the methods section, I see that the wording they actually used was "We are interested in whether you think these headlines describe an event that actually happened in an accurate and unbiased way." So, their measurements refer to whatever the participants interpreted that question to mean.
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
> Merely reading false news posts [makes inaccurate beliefs] subsequently seem more true. >the widespread sharing of misinformation on social media is also surprising, given the outlandishness of much of this content. Emotional reactions plausibly drive the first observation, so the second observation shouldn't be surprising. If it really is, then they don't see the emotional component. And yet: >Our results suggest that the current design of social media platforms—in which users scroll quickly through a mixture of serious news and emotionally engaging content, and receive instantaneous quantified social feedback on their sharing—may discourage people from reflecting on accuracy. They conclude that distraction is the cause, and that nagging users will solve it ("reminding them about accuracy in a subtle way that should avoid reactance"). Yet if the study is flawed, and the distraction tied up in emotional outrage, wounded identity, and spite, then those nags may only insense the users more. Of course, considering already-distracted Mechanical Turk workers and people who link to "right-leaning sites that professional fact-checkers have rated as highly untrustworthy" shows that the authors of the study failed to consider much more than emotional actors.
brightball 6y ago
Can it though? The bigger issue is removal of important details that provide context. Everything else can be factually accurate, but tell a completely different story. Unless you have first hand knowledge you won’t know what’s missing. You see this all the time if you read a story on a subject where you have expertise. “Tim punched Bob Bob punched Tim Tim and Bob shook hands” Is a very different story than if only “Bob punched Tim” is reported. It’s accurate...but it changes the story perception.
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  Every story has a million ways to tell it, they are all biased, there is no universal truth even if every word of the story is true and nothing factual has been left out. Facts can be misleading also, context not to do with the story can matter a lot. I am not even sure how I would go about determining most political news is true or factual, even the speeches are usually cut down to snippets for the news. Bias is everywhere and to determine something is even largely true is an enormous amount of work going back to the original source. A recent example is a Green party female member in the House of Lords who said that all men should be under curfew to protect women from being attacked at mogjt. Literally what she said, but not what she meant at all because the context was after the police said women should stay home at night for their own safety. Without the context its true, but its also misleading. As is my portrayal of the story, as was every news article about it. No idea how you fix it, language needs to be more facts based as does our culture and even then you are chasing more correct not literally true.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Universal truth would require creating quorum with billions of people simultaneously.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      Even that might not be universal truth. Billions of Hindus would disagree with billions of Muslims who would disagree with billions of Christians, who would disagree with billions of unaffiliated people/atheists.
DC1350 6y ago
Misinformation is a made up problem. With the amount of information we have now it’s trivial to push any narrative just by amplifying the “right” true information. It’s why every politician has a source saying they’re a sex offender. Most of the accusations are real but which one you believe depends on where you look. Or just look at all the articles that quote nobodies on Twitter.
buffalobuffalo 6y ago
Interesting, but long term probably irrelevant. I think we are almost at the end of the era of un-curated online information. As the technology to deploy bots that are indistinguishable from humans becomes more widespread, the proportion of online conversations that even involve humans is going to trend towards zero. Eventually, it's all going to be such hyperbolic noise that nobody will even pay attention.
sudhirj 6y ago
So to all the people working in social media, can you add a slider at the bottom of every share widget asking people to rate how accurate what they're sharing is on a scale of 1 to 10? You don't even need to store the result, it looks like forcing people to think will solve a lot of the world's problems.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Has that ever worked? Rating schemes turn into approval scales for whatever people want them to, not what they're called. The Slashdot moderation system might work up to a point. In the end, subscribing to moderators you trust (instead of subscribing to killfiles like Mastodon and Twitter groups use) may be the only way to evaluate comments.
  - sudhirj 6y ago
    Not a rating scheme, the value would the thrown away and never shown to anyone. The point isn't to collect information, only to force the sharer to think.
    - 7786655 6y ago
      And the sharer is just going to trust you to throw away that information? I don't think so.
      - mcBesse 6y ago
        Most people aren't careful about what information is collected on them in the first place. Are people going to stop sharing things on Twitter because they're afraid of giving up one more tidbit of information to big data? I don't think so. It's besides the point anyway. Any mechanism that primes or prompts the sharer to be mindful of accuracy before sharing could help reduce sharing of misinformation, according to the results from the article.
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    Really surprised that no social media with nano-payment-funded distributed and syndicated moderation exists. Centralization of moderation is taken as de facto, but I'm skeptical that it has to be this way.
antattack 6y ago
'Close to half' could be also 'majority' or 'minority', depending on whose side you are on. 'Overwhelming majority' better be more than 75% but it's often less. 'Small percentage'...of 300mln people is still a substantial number. Add to that much of arguments we use daily are based on sampling which has a varied degree of accuracy. I think all we can do is to agree to disagree...vote and respect voting results.
glasss 6y ago
I can appreciate this study putting some numbers and metrics to a phenomena that I'm sure a lot of people would agree exists. Something that is probably controversial - I think it is just far too easy to share articles, blogs, etc through social media. If you were to put in a small hurdle, even just needing to copy-paste the actual link to the article instead of clicking a share button, I would imagine a significant volume of sharing (admittedly everything, including good / accurate information) would disappear. If it was just a little bit harder to share misinformation, I think it would overall be a benefit.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Presuming that people who don't block third-party scripts to add social media widgets to click "share" without copying and pasting are automatically posting "misinformation"?
renewiltord 6y ago
In general, allowing people to misinform themselves and the people in their circle is a good thing. It applies competitive pressure so that superior information extractors can have an advantage over inferior information extractors. Long-term human survival depends on superior information extraction, so it is better that poor information extractors are currently culled or weakened. For instance, I love that Bloomberg News is beloved by many Americans, notably (to this audience) HN readers. That's how I made money off the SuperMicro news. I, through pre-existing experience, knew that they were a low quality news source incapable of technology reporting of any calibre. Others, since they lacked this knowledge, sold SMCI. I bought at a discount as a result, and made money. This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity. ¹ I am neither a tech luminary nor one of these people because I had this false picture of the competence of the CDC - an error that cost me six figures.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Your conclusion doesn't at all follow from your premise. It's at best a modern-malthusian position, that those who are strongest at information extraction should survive. (As opposed to Malthus's original proposition, that only the wealthy should survive). But this begs the question: what makes "information extraction" the thing that we should optimize for at social scale? If we can make it so that everyone has access to correct information, there will no longer be a need to compete on information extraction. This similarly tracks with Malthus's wrongness: we don't actually need to compete on food prices, as we've got enough to go around, there isn't a shortage of food for only the wealthy. And this is true at world scale. Barring some kind of massive catastrophe, we aren't at risk of global starvation where a Malthusian approach would make sense. > This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity. Taking this to its logical conclusion, you are saying that it is a better outcome that the CDC was wrong, as some tech luminaries made money, than if they had not made money and the CDC had provided superior initial guidance, saving thousands of lives.
  - 6y ago
varispeed 6y ago
Articles that carry misinformation can be easily found out because of the thought schemes they are using. The problem is that such language is also used by governments, so that's why people are not taught how to spot this. I have a couple of friends who seem to be susceptible to fake news and they come to me with different stories how something is bad or some weird conspiracy theories that I find tedious to debunk for them, but even if I do they still have that sense that because someone has authority, even if what that person saying or writing is not true, it is true for them. When I try to show them these schemes, they don't want to hear it as they think "they got me". This is insane and probably they need to find out how they are getting this wrong by themselves, just as I did.
specialist 6y ago
Truthiness, or lack thereof, is a second order effect. Algorithms boosting viral content and inauthentic speech are first order effects. -- No, bots, trolls, socketpuppet accounts are not authentic speech. I didn't say censorship. I didn't say truthiness. I said inauthentic. No, I didn't say ban inauthentic speech. I'm saying create infrastructure for authentic speech. Because currently we have very little. So that consumers have a choice. Yes, keep your pseudonym account. For your all-important courageous deep undercover reporting which will definitely be recognized with a Pulitzer. To be accepted anonymously, natch.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago
  >create infrastructure for authentic speech. What would that look like?
  - specialist 6y ago
    Thanks for asking. It starts with verified identity. eg metafilter.com requires photo id and $5. (Parler trued to do something similar. Very interesting. Alas, I didn't scout that before they shut down.) There are many potential IRL "root authorities". Like issuers of business licenses could serve as root for online presences.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      That is the same logical fallacy as "we can solve deepfakes with blockchain in cameras!". Authenicating the source is not synonymous with validating the truth of the content. David Icke goes by his real name and he pushes insand bullshit. I don't know why people think real identity is a sign of truth when liars have been making careers doing so for millenia.
      - specialist 6y ago
        I apologize. Authenticity != truthiness. They are orthogonal. How do I rephrase my points to make this crystal clear?
colllectorof 6y ago
"Therefore, shifting attention to the concept of accuracy can cause people to improve the quality of the news that they share." It will not have a significant enough impact on the overall collapse of sense-making that we're seeing. Neil Postman wrote really well about it in Technopoly, but since the book isn't available online, I can only direct you here: https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE?t=928 https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE?t=928
- centimeter 6y ago
  > the overall collapse of sense-making I suspect this is caused more by the collapse of (false, but easily comprehensible) narratives than an actual reduction in coherent reasoning. Most "normies", so to speak, have always believed a huge amount of bullshit, and the forces that stabilized schelling points in bullshit-space have been diminished.
ddingus 6y ago
I submit clarity would improve even more. By clarity, I mean fact and opinion very clearly differentiated. Facts are common. For a given story: There are facts. Some of those may be disputed. Fine. Great discussion to have. At some point, we arrive at opinion, and this generally is what the authors believe the facts mean. Bias colors all of that. There is always bias. Always. The emphasis on clarity gets at the influence of bias by making it easy to understand what the bias actually is. Currently, we largely sidestep bias with various, low clarity arguments: Official Fair and Balanced Objective (this actually takes a number of us working together over a sustained time to do. You can be 1000 percent sure it does not ever happen in a cable news cycle. Ever.) Size, with 3 and up to few letter big players attempting to be reputable because reasons. You get the idea. Clarity is powerful. It implies accuracy, helps people to understand bias and when bias is different from stated intent or claims of authority, or publication of record, note, stature. Did I mention there is always bias? Always? A great example in the US might be coverage from the labor point of view versus big business point of view. Larger, established organizations rarely publish or broadcast from the labor point of view. Low clarity material makes understanding that as well as what is fact and what is opinion very hard to discern. Small orgs, indie media, often does more from the labor point of view, and lower clarity beings the same difficulty. Many more examples abound! Low clarity facilitates endless meta too: Who is objective? (Nobody in reality, but they all say "the other people" are "a problem" or "are untrustworthy" somehow. This is all expensive and useless. I could go on. Greater clarity. It will help. By nature, it is more accurate. It makes bias more easily understood. And on that point, bias is OK! It takes too many of us too long to be objective. We can benefit from well understood bias and seek multiple points of view to help us be informed and form our own opinions. Clarity requires disclosure. It will also force truth in branding. "News you can trust" means nothing when it is an unclear mess of fact, opinion, bias all mashed together to get a reaction, is it? Nope. I submit a push for clarity does the most good. I say that, because we can't solve the thinking for people problem. We can Empower them to think better, and we can give them more clear material to think with, and we can foster discussion that encourages common ground, but we can't actually think for them. And just as an example, when I was a little kid in primary school we had a media class. That class covered the basic types of propaganda, with advertising as a vehicle to demonstrate all of them. It had a topic on bias, identifying the point of view from which the piece was written and why that matters. It even talked about clarity. In any given piece, are fact and opinion well differentiated? Where they aren't, that piece isn't very reputable, or useful, or the minimum you need to do is seek more information if you're intrigued at all. We read articles from the labor point of view, we read articles written from overseas, ones from the local newspaper, from big business, and we talked about them and we found the common facts and we found out how to think for ourselves. That was seventh grade. In a small backward town no less! I am regularly shocked at how poor our media is today, and how ill-equipped so many of us are to deal with it. All of these rule based schemes avoid both the clarity and trust problems inherent in all media. Secondly, they sidestep the intended discourse! Not only are we supposed to be thinking for ourselves, but we are to be understanding one another well enough for policy discussions to make better overall sense! All of this is why we used to teach critical thinking in primary education. Today, we do not do that very well and look at the mess! Software won't fix this. Humans doing the work to improve will.
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
It won't matter. People are immune to being corrected. They have to correct themselves. "An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2?TB%20iframe=true&width=921.6&height=4638.6&error=cookies_not_supported&code=1a71d8d1-e963-432b-851e-17771c195849 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2?...
- 0xy 6y ago
  Of course it's going to backfire when partisan groups like Politifact and the Washington Post are running the entire operation, too. Especially around politics, there's basically no such thing as fact. If politician X says that plan Y reduces problem Z by 13% but actually it was only reduced by 11.5%, technically he's wrong but the classification of his statement becomes subjective. This is where bias seeps in. If a right wing politician is off by 1% in a statement it's "mostly false". If a left wing politician is off by 1% it's "mostly true". I don't trust ANY of these organizations to "fact check" anything because they're utterly discredited.
theknocker 6y ago
Oh so for instance, when the press just makes shit up, we admit it to ourselves instead of just smearing anyone who notices and censoring them as conspiracy theorists? Yeah what a wild concept.

133 points by mpweiher 6y ago

Given that political discourse so often takes the form of "I am right and you are wrong", it's easy to foresee that tools to prevent the sharing of misinformation will in practice end up as tools to prevent the sharing of information from people the wielder of the tool disagrees with. Then, it's just another propaganda arms race between the information sharing and information dissemination technologists of both sides. I think this is not the kind of research that will ultimately lead to a more healthy public debate.

yorwba 6y ago
But the tool in the article is to ask people whether they think a certain headline is accurate and then looking at the effect that has on their sharing of other articles. If someone with the "I am right and you are wrong" mindset shares fewer articles they think are not accurate, they'll actually be right more often. (At least in their own opinion.) If this gets weaponized to make people on "both sides" pay more attention to the accuracy of what they're sharing, I'd expect that to result in a more healthy public debate.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The researchers anticipate that concern, and specifically checked whether "information vs. misinformation" just boiled down to partisan disputes about what's true. They found that "our participants were more than twice as likely to consider sharing false but politically concordant headlines (37.4%) as they were to rate such headlines as accurate", suggesting that there really is a problem of people sharing things they know aren't strictly accurate.
Natsu 6y ago
Another part of the problem is that you cannot unring a bell. For example, the WaPo issued a retraction yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-investigator/2021/01/09/7a55c7fa-51cf-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-i... The headline quotes from their original story were proven wrong when deleted audio of the call was recovered: https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-to-georgia-lead-investigator-reveals-new-details-11615411561 https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-t... But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_final.pdf https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_... This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter of great importance that injected false information into it. Information that was somehow 'confirmed' by several other publications relying on their own anonymous sources.
- tomComb 6y ago
  There is no perfect solution here, but at least they had to publicly acknowledge their error. This is much better than with the sources most people use. I often see people say 'hey look at this terrible thing WaPo or NYT did' as an excuse for reading whatever garbage source is saying exactly what they want to hear. It's not all of nothing.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Indeed, you can cherry pick individual examples of inaccurate reporting from literally any media outlet. It seems suspicious to me that this commenter picked out a story criticising the right that had some innacuracies when it's largely media outlets on the right that have a history of actually repeatedly reporting outright lies in recent history (see Fox, OAN, Newsmax etc).
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  They did not issue a retraction. They issued a correction. The precise language of the call is different, but the core of the reporting is unchanged. The precise differences are that, what was quoted as "find the fraud" was actually find "dishonesty", and you'll "a national hero" was actually that you have "the most important job in the country right now". This doesn't change the overall story: Trump attempted to reach out to GA election officials and push them to overturn election results. > But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: None of the citations on page 10 reference this reporting or any of the quotes attributed to Trump on this call.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, the differences from the reporting and the actual call are exactly the sorts of differences you'd expect if their anonymous source was someone who had heard the call once and was conveying the wording based off of memory. There's no significant difference in meaning as far as I can tell - Trump was still instructing them to find him votes.
  - 6y ago
dfay 6y ago
You should carefully read the paper linked. Your comment may be correct but it's not a valid criticism of the methods the study used.
s17n 6y ago
What does this have to do with the article?
NoodleIncident 6y ago
This article focuses entirely on people regulating their own decisions to share an article, not any attempt by a "tool wielder" to selectively block any content. To put their study into context, it suggests that if Facebook asked users to rate whether an unrelated article was accurate before allowing you to share their own, many people would pay attention to whether their own articles were accurate, and less misinformation would be shared. This could be applied universally to any news article, both for detecting people sharing it, and populating the pre-share accuracy judgement. Instead, Facebook streamlines the process to increase engagement, and people blitz through it without stopping to consider the article's accuracy at all, distracted by thinking of all the likes they'll get for posting it. According to the study, when users are already primed to judge the accuracy of an article, they are more likely to self-regulate their own misinformation.
- didibus 6y ago
  Absolutely, what more, and I'm culpable of this too, often things are re-shared where you only read the headline, or even just skimmed through the article barely reading it or spending any time to think through it.
rediguanayum 6y ago
I don't think debate is the issue. The issue is people lying to each other to motivate certain problematic behavior like riots and elections. Moreover the echo chamber effect created by the information sharing technologists to increase clicks, makes having a meaningful debate moot.

Kapura 6y ago

What does it matter if you have a manager, or your manager has a manager, who will approve or disapprove a new disinfo policy based on whether or not it affects specific political groups? A fish rots from the head.

thepasswordis 6y ago

Unfortunately "accuracy" has been recoded to "insurrectionist". Take for instance the recent retraction published by the washington post about Trumps interaction with the Georgia Secretary of State pressuring him to "find votes". People pay close attention to the news pointed out the misinformation that WaPo was peddling, and how dangerous it was, and those people were called every mean name in the book. Eventually those people will just stop pointing out the innacuracies in reporting.

gameswithgo 6y ago
We all heard the actual audio of that call, and he absolutely was pressuring the secretary of state to find votes. So while WAPO got inaccurate quotes the content of the call was absolutely "insurrectionist".
- thepasswordis 6y ago
  Do you see what you are doing right here? You're leaving out the context to make a political point. Yes, he was asking the SoS to "find votes". However, the claim was: "We believe that there may be over 100k votes which could fail signature verification, and we only need you to find several thousand of them, a small fraction of what we believe you will find." That is very different than what both you and the WaPo implied. The claim is related to signature verification. So argue with that if you don't agree with it. But that isn't what happened.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    That is absolutely within the bounds of the generic "find me the votes". There is always some pretext for finding those votes.
  - btilly 6y ago
    He didn't just want her to find votes that can fail signature verification, he wanted her to look for them in specific areas that vote heavily Democratic. Which means that he was not asking her to validate that people voted accurately, he was asking her to slip her thumbs on the scales and make the vote come out his way. That is why he "needed" her to do so. Because he wanted the vote to come to the result that he wanted, and not the result that reflected the actual will of the voters.

saas_sam 6y ago

Nature retracted a peer-reviewed paper last November after pressure from those with a particular political/ideological bent. You can read the details here and decide for yourself if their reasoning is valid for the retraction. Did not seem very valid to me personally, especially given they did not retract the authors' prior work using similar methods (but with a conclusion the aforementioned political actors would find most pleasing, rather than upsetting): https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/21/nature-communications-retracts-much-criticized-paper-on-mentorship/ https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/21/nature-communications...

jberryman 6y ago
Why are you grinding your axe in this thread? Totally irrelevant to TFA
- saas_sam 6y ago
  I think skepticism of the source's authoritativeness on the subject of information-filtering is perfectly relevant to TFA. But you are free to disagree and downvote if you want to punish me further.

mclanett 6y ago

What I find both amusing and frustrating is that the linked article uses the word "accuracy" 110 times but never explains what is meant by it. For example in the headline "Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests", what is meant by rating for accuracy? Is it the number 500 and whether it is low, exact, or high? Is it whether the people were migrants? Is it whether the vests were explosive? Is it whether the story is in any way truthful? I really have no idea. Is "accuracy" an alias for "truthful" or something else? The article doesn't explain.

yorwba 6y ago
From the article: Participants were randomly assigned to then either judge the veracity of each headline (accuracy condition) or indicate whether they would consider sharing each headline online (sharing condition) So they use "accuracy" as an alias for "veracity". But they don't really need to define it, because the study is about what the participants think is accurate, not the researchers. EDIT: Now that I've made it down to the methods section, I see that the wording they actually used was "We are interested in whether you think these headlines describe an event that actually happened in an accurate and unbiased way." So, their measurements refer to whatever the participants interpreted that question to mean.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago

> Merely reading false news posts [makes inaccurate beliefs] subsequently seem more true. >the widespread sharing of misinformation on social media is also surprising, given the outlandishness of much of this content. Emotional reactions plausibly drive the first observation, so the second observation shouldn't be surprising. If it really is, then they don't see the emotional component. And yet: >Our results suggest that the current design of social media platforms—in which users scroll quickly through a mixture of serious news and emotionally engaging content, and receive instantaneous quantified social feedback on their sharing—may discourage people from reflecting on accuracy. They conclude that distraction is the cause, and that nagging users will solve it ("reminding them about accuracy in a subtle way that should avoid reactance"). Yet if the study is flawed, and the distraction tied up in emotional outrage, wounded identity, and spite, then those nags may only insense the users more. Of course, considering already-distracted Mechanical Turk workers and people who link to "right-leaning sites that professional fact-checkers have rated as highly untrustworthy" shows that the authors of the study failed to consider much more than emotional actors.

brightball 6y ago

Can it though? The bigger issue is removal of important details that provide context. Everything else can be factually accurate, but tell a completely different story. Unless you have first hand knowledge you won’t know what’s missing. You see this all the time if you read a story on a subject where you have expertise. “Tim punched Bob Bob punched Tim Tim and Bob shook hands” Is a very different story than if only “Bob punched Tim” is reported. It’s accurate...but it changes the story perception.

PaulKeeble 6y ago
Every story has a million ways to tell it, they are all biased, there is no universal truth even if every word of the story is true and nothing factual has been left out. Facts can be misleading also, context not to do with the story can matter a lot. I am not even sure how I would go about determining most political news is true or factual, even the speeches are usually cut down to snippets for the news. Bias is everywhere and to determine something is even largely true is an enormous amount of work going back to the original source. A recent example is a Green party female member in the House of Lords who said that all men should be under curfew to protect women from being attacked at mogjt. Literally what she said, but not what she meant at all because the context was after the police said women should stay home at night for their own safety. Without the context its true, but its also misleading. As is my portrayal of the story, as was every news article about it. No idea how you fix it, language needs to be more facts based as does our culture and even then you are chasing more correct not literally true.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Universal truth would require creating quorum with billions of people simultaneously.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Even that might not be universal truth. Billions of Hindus would disagree with billions of Muslims who would disagree with billions of Christians, who would disagree with billions of unaffiliated people/atheists.

DC1350 6y ago

Misinformation is a made up problem. With the amount of information we have now it’s trivial to push any narrative just by amplifying the “right” true information. It’s why every politician has a source saying they’re a sex offender. Most of the accusations are real but which one you believe depends on where you look. Or just look at all the articles that quote nobodies on Twitter.

buffalobuffalo 6y ago

Interesting, but long term probably irrelevant. I think we are almost at the end of the era of un-curated online information. As the technology to deploy bots that are indistinguishable from humans becomes more widespread, the proportion of online conversations that even involve humans is going to trend towards zero. Eventually, it's all going to be such hyperbolic noise that nobody will even pay attention.

sudhirj 6y ago

So to all the people working in social media, can you add a slider at the bottom of every share widget asking people to rate how accurate what they're sharing is on a scale of 1 to 10? You don't even need to store the result, it looks like forcing people to think will solve a lot of the world's problems.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Has that ever worked? Rating schemes turn into approval scales for whatever people want them to, not what they're called. The Slashdot moderation system might work up to a point. In the end, subscribing to moderators you trust (instead of subscribing to killfiles like Mastodon and Twitter groups use) may be the only way to evaluate comments.
- sudhirj 6y ago
  Not a rating scheme, the value would the thrown away and never shown to anyone. The point isn't to collect information, only to force the sharer to think.
  - 7786655 6y ago
    And the sharer is just going to trust you to throw away that information? I don't think so.
    - mcBesse 6y ago
      Most people aren't careful about what information is collected on them in the first place. Are people going to stop sharing things on Twitter because they're afraid of giving up one more tidbit of information to big data? I don't think so. It's besides the point anyway. Any mechanism that primes or prompts the sharer to be mindful of accuracy before sharing could help reduce sharing of misinformation, according to the results from the article.
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  Really surprised that no social media with nano-payment-funded distributed and syndicated moderation exists. Centralization of moderation is taken as de facto, but I'm skeptical that it has to be this way.

antattack 6y ago

'Close to half' could be also 'majority' or 'minority', depending on whose side you are on. 'Overwhelming majority' better be more than 75% but it's often less. 'Small percentage'...of 300mln people is still a substantial number. Add to that much of arguments we use daily are based on sampling which has a varied degree of accuracy. I think all we can do is to agree to disagree...vote and respect voting results.

glasss 6y ago

I can appreciate this study putting some numbers and metrics to a phenomena that I'm sure a lot of people would agree exists. Something that is probably controversial - I think it is just far too easy to share articles, blogs, etc through social media. If you were to put in a small hurdle, even just needing to copy-paste the actual link to the article instead of clicking a share button, I would imagine a significant volume of sharing (admittedly everything, including good / accurate information) would disappear. If it was just a little bit harder to share misinformation, I think it would overall be a benefit.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Presuming that people who don't block third-party scripts to add social media widgets to click "share" without copying and pasting are automatically posting "misinformation"?

renewiltord 6y ago

In general, allowing people to misinform themselves and the people in their circle is a good thing. It applies competitive pressure so that superior information extractors can have an advantage over inferior information extractors. Long-term human survival depends on superior information extraction, so it is better that poor information extractors are currently culled or weakened. For instance, I love that Bloomberg News is beloved by many Americans, notably (to this audience) HN readers. That's how I made money off the SuperMicro news. I, through pre-existing experience, knew that they were a low quality news source incapable of technology reporting of any calibre. Others, since they lacked this knowledge, sold SMCI. I bought at a discount as a result, and made money. This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity. ¹ I am neither a tech luminary nor one of these people because I had this false picture of the competence of the CDC - an error that cost me six figures.

joshuamorton 6y ago
Your conclusion doesn't at all follow from your premise. It's at best a modern-malthusian position, that those who are strongest at information extraction should survive. (As opposed to Malthus's original proposition, that only the wealthy should survive). But this begs the question: what makes "information extraction" the thing that we should optimize for at social scale? If we can make it so that everyone has access to correct information, there will no longer be a need to compete on information extraction. This similarly tracks with Malthus's wrongness: we don't actually need to compete on food prices, as we've got enough to go around, there isn't a shortage of food for only the wealthy. And this is true at world scale. Barring some kind of massive catastrophe, we aren't at risk of global starvation where a Malthusian approach would make sense. > This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity. Taking this to its logical conclusion, you are saying that it is a better outcome that the CDC was wrong, as some tech luminaries made money, than if they had not made money and the CDC had provided superior initial guidance, saving thousands of lives.
- 6y ago

varispeed 6y ago

Articles that carry misinformation can be easily found out because of the thought schemes they are using. The problem is that such language is also used by governments, so that's why people are not taught how to spot this. I have a couple of friends who seem to be susceptible to fake news and they come to me with different stories how something is bad or some weird conspiracy theories that I find tedious to debunk for them, but even if I do they still have that sense that because someone has authority, even if what that person saying or writing is not true, it is true for them. When I try to show them these schemes, they don't want to hear it as they think "they got me". This is insane and probably they need to find out how they are getting this wrong by themselves, just as I did.

specialist 6y ago

Truthiness, or lack thereof, is a second order effect. Algorithms boosting viral content and inauthentic speech are first order effects. -- No, bots, trolls, socketpuppet accounts are not authentic speech. I didn't say censorship. I didn't say truthiness. I said inauthentic. No, I didn't say ban inauthentic speech. I'm saying create infrastructure for authentic speech. Because currently we have very little. So that consumers have a choice. Yes, keep your pseudonym account. For your all-important courageous deep undercover reporting which will definitely be recognized with a Pulitzer. To be accepted anonymously, natch.

loveistheanswer 6y ago
>create infrastructure for authentic speech. What would that look like?
- specialist 6y ago
  Thanks for asking. It starts with verified identity. eg metafilter.com requires photo id and $5. (Parler trued to do something similar. Very interesting. Alas, I didn't scout that before they shut down.) There are many potential IRL "root authorities". Like issuers of business licenses could serve as root for online presences.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    That is the same logical fallacy as "we can solve deepfakes with blockchain in cameras!". Authenicating the source is not synonymous with validating the truth of the content. David Icke goes by his real name and he pushes insand bullshit. I don't know why people think real identity is a sign of truth when liars have been making careers doing so for millenia.
    - specialist 6y ago
      I apologize. Authenticity != truthiness. They are orthogonal. How do I rephrase my points to make this crystal clear?

colllectorof 6y ago

"Therefore, shifting attention to the concept of accuracy can cause people to improve the quality of the news that they share." It will not have a significant enough impact on the overall collapse of sense-making that we're seeing. Neil Postman wrote really well about it in Technopoly, but since the book isn't available online, I can only direct you here: https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE?t=928 https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE?t=928

centimeter 6y ago
> the overall collapse of sense-making I suspect this is caused more by the collapse of (false, but easily comprehensible) narratives than an actual reduction in coherent reasoning. Most "normies", so to speak, have always believed a huge amount of bullshit, and the forces that stabilized schelling points in bullshit-space have been diminished.

ddingus 6y ago

I submit clarity would improve even more. By clarity, I mean fact and opinion very clearly differentiated. Facts are common. For a given story: There are facts. Some of those may be disputed. Fine. Great discussion to have. At some point, we arrive at opinion, and this generally is what the authors believe the facts mean. Bias colors all of that. There is always bias. Always. The emphasis on clarity gets at the influence of bias by making it easy to understand what the bias actually is. Currently, we largely sidestep bias with various, low clarity arguments: Official Fair and Balanced Objective (this actually takes a number of us working together over a sustained time to do. You can be 1000 percent sure it does not ever happen in a cable news cycle. Ever.) Size, with 3 and up to few letter big players attempting to be reputable because reasons. You get the idea. Clarity is powerful. It implies accuracy, helps people to understand bias and when bias is different from stated intent or claims of authority, or publication of record, note, stature. Did I mention there is always bias? Always? A great example in the US might be coverage from the labor point of view versus big business point of view. Larger, established organizations rarely publish or broadcast from the labor point of view. Low clarity material makes understanding that as well as what is fact and what is opinion very hard to discern. Small orgs, indie media, often does more from the labor point of view, and lower clarity beings the same difficulty. Many more examples abound! Low clarity facilitates endless meta too: Who is objective? (Nobody in reality, but they all say "the other people" are "a problem" or "are untrustworthy" somehow. This is all expensive and useless. I could go on. Greater clarity. It will help. By nature, it is more accurate. It makes bias more easily understood. And on that point, bias is OK! It takes too many of us too long to be objective. We can benefit from well understood bias and seek multiple points of view to help us be informed and form our own opinions. Clarity requires disclosure. It will also force truth in branding. "News you can trust" means nothing when it is an unclear mess of fact, opinion, bias all mashed together to get a reaction, is it? Nope. I submit a push for clarity does the most good. I say that, because we can't solve the thinking for people problem. We can Empower them to think better, and we can give them more clear material to think with, and we can foster discussion that encourages common ground, but we can't actually think for them. And just as an example, when I was a little kid in primary school we had a media class. That class covered the basic types of propaganda, with advertising as a vehicle to demonstrate all of them. It had a topic on bias, identifying the point of view from which the piece was written and why that matters. It even talked about clarity. In any given piece, are fact and opinion well differentiated? Where they aren't, that piece isn't very reputable, or useful, or the minimum you need to do is seek more information if you're intrigued at all. We read articles from the labor point of view, we read articles written from overseas, ones from the local newspaper, from big business, and we talked about them and we found the common facts and we found out how to think for ourselves. That was seventh grade. In a small backward town no less! I am regularly shocked at how poor our media is today, and how ill-equipped so many of us are to deal with it. All of these rule based schemes avoid both the clarity and trust problems inherent in all media. Secondly, they sidestep the intended discourse! Not only are we supposed to be thinking for ourselves, but we are to be understanding one another well enough for policy discussions to make better overall sense! All of this is why we used to teach critical thinking in primary education. Today, we do not do that very well and look at the mess! Software won't fix this. Humans doing the work to improve will.

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

It won't matter. People are immune to being corrected. They have to correct themselves. "An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2?TB%20iframe=true&width=921.6&height=4638.6&error=cookies_not_supported&code=1a71d8d1-e963-432b-851e-17771c195849 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2?...

0xy 6y ago
Of course it's going to backfire when partisan groups like Politifact and the Washington Post are running the entire operation, too. Especially around politics, there's basically no such thing as fact. If politician X says that plan Y reduces problem Z by 13% but actually it was only reduced by 11.5%, technically he's wrong but the classification of his statement becomes subjective. This is where bias seeps in. If a right wing politician is off by 1% in a statement it's "mostly false". If a left wing politician is off by 1% it's "mostly true". I don't trust ANY of these organizations to "fact check" anything because they're utterly discredited.

theknocker 6y ago

Oh so for instance, when the press just makes shit up, we admit it to ourselves instead of just smearing anyone who notices and censoring them as conspiracy theorists? Yeah what a wild concept.