The 2010 Newtown massacre of children was staged by actors. Billionaire George Soros funds groups for the purpose of staging protests across the U.S. COVID19 was caused by 5G technology. If these sound like fanciful assertions, they should. They are “fake news,” spread deliberately or not and often amplified by social media.
Of concern during the 2016 presidential election, using fake news to shape opinions and spread conspiracy theories is intensifying. In a 2019 Pew Research poll, half of Americans listed it as one of the nation’s biggest problems. The Oxford Internet Institute found its use has spread to 70 countries. U.S. intelligence agencies have said to expect it in the current presidential election.
Not only does fake news distort decision making, it pushes truth to the sidelines. A study of 126,000 Twitter stories over a ten-year period found fake stories reached people six times faster on average than true ones. Even one-time exposure to fake news is associated with believability a week later, despite its being contested by fact-checking. Fake news can lead to remembering things that never happened. In a study at University College Cork, an Irish researcher gave participants six stories, two of which were made up, about an upcoming abortion referendum. Nearly half of the subjects reported remembering the events of a fake story, some including rich details never in the story. Even when informed that some stories were fake, many refused to reconsider their recollections.
The problem will get worse. Technology now allows “deep fakes,” videos that purport to show people doing or saying things they never did. Last year a deep fake “showed” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stumbling through a speech, and this year one “showed” Joe Biden calling for President Trump’s re-election.
Research offers hope. Not everyone sees or believes fake news. After the 2016 election, two Stanford researchers polled American voters on how often they had heard, and how much they believed, three types of stories: true stories, “fake” news debunked by fact-check sites, and “fake-fake-news” which was made up by the researchers but never published. Only 15.3% reported seeing “fake news” and just 7.9% believed it. Only 14.1% reported seeing the “fake-fake-news” and just 8.3% believed it.
In short, we’re armed with a “fake news detector” capability – if we turn it on.
In the Irish study, people were more likely to “remember” false stories about those with whom they differed politically, allowing confirmation bias to shape their thinking. In a study at University College London, people on both political extremes were less willing to question their accuracy in coming to conclusions: they had a hard time thinking about how they think. People who overestimate how smart they are also find fake news more accurate.
Whether we question “fake news” is bound up with our emotions. Reliance on emotion increases the tendency to believe “fake news.” One study examined the tendency of participants to allow others to sway their views on what they saw in a film. When shown the (wrong) views of others (actually a computer) a week later, many participants changed their opinion to conform to the erroneous reports. When told a week later that their views were falsely manipulated, those who had originally reacted more emotionally to the film were more likely to persist in their clearly wrong conclusions.
Yet reason is a powerful countermeasure. In the film study, participants who overcame their emotions when they found out their views had been manipulated did so through increased activity in the anterior-lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with logical reasoning. A study in which participants were shown a series of headlines found they initially believed false ones more than true ones but, given time to think more carefully, they often corrected themselves. Recent research on COVID19 bears this out. People shown true and fake headlines about the virus did a better job distinguishing between them when they were first asked to determine whether a non-COVID19 headline was true or false. Getting their critical thinking juices flowing helped when the real need for them came.
We are as gullible as we allow ourselves to be, and it’s foolish to count on social media sites to censor themselves. Research by George Pennycook and colleagues led them to coin “the implied truth effect” - headlines to which sites have not attached a false or not-validated tag are assumed to be true. Other research has shown we re-send links we have not even opened, and a Pew poll found that almost a quarter of respondents shared a fake news story.
Vigilance, intellectual humility, and thinking are the only antidotes. As reported by Time, a study by Stanford psychologist San Wineburg found that too many of us don’t question what we see online. Yet there are a number of websites where assertions can be fact-checked, such as factcheck.org, AP Fact Check, and USA Facts.org.
Fake news is here to stay, but we don’t need to be faked out by it.
Photo Credit: Marc Winkler @ unsplash.com
