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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 misinformati

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.

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.