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[Misleading] First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news (phys.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by somefool@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org

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Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a "resilience" ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.

The paper

Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it's worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).

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[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

May I be honest? The study is awful. It has two big methodological flaws that stain completely its outcome.

The first one is the absence of either an "I don't know" answer, or a sliding scale for sureness of your answer. In large part, misinformation is a result of lack of scepticism - that is, failure at saying "I don't know this". And odds are that you're more likely to spread discourses that you're sure about, be them misinformation or actual information.

The second flaw is over-reliance on geographically relevant information. Compare for example the following three questions:

Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality
International Relations Experts and US Public Agree: America Is Less Respected Globally
Attitudes Toward EU Are Largely Positive, Both Within Europe and Outside It

The likelihood of someone living in Morocco, USA and the EU to be misinformed about #1, #2 and #3 respectively is far lower than the odds of someone living elsewhere. And more than that: due to the first methodological flaw, the study isn't handling the difference between "misinformed" (someone who gets it wrong) and "uninformed" (someone who doesn't believe anything in this regard).

(For me, who don't live in any of those three: the questions regarding EU are a bit easier to know about, but the other two? Might as well toss a coin.)

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

You are totally right. It mostly tests whether you are up to date on the current news stories in the "correct" part of the world.

What's making this worse is that "Government Officials Have Manipulated Stock Prices to Hide Scandals" is classified as a fake news headline. That might be true in the US, but here exactly this happened. Or at least they tried and failed. Someone working for a big state pension fund was gambling with the fund's money and when she lost a lot of it, she tried manipulation to win the money back, which failed.

The right way to discern fake news from real news (apart from maybe really obvious examples) is to read the article, check the sources and compare with other sources.

In 2013 a headline like "Putin about to start a decade-long war in Europe that will cause a world-wide financial crisis" would have been a ridiculous clickbait fake news headline.

Same with "The whole continent is not allowed to leave their homes for months due to Chinese virus" in 2019.

Or "CIA is spying on all internet users" in 2008.

And yet these things happened.

Because what makes fake news is not whether it is outlandish that something like that could happen, but instead it's fake news because it hasn't happened.