Why Do We Fall for Fake News?

Flap Zappa wrote:some news may well be fake, however a bigger question is why did the MSM ignore so much of what did appear from the email dumps of the DNC and the project veritas investigation of DNC shady goings on.

Certainly project veritas was doing what traditional MSM investigative journalists should have been doing. Exposing the rot at the core of the DNC. Sadly too much of the MSM was entrenched within the DNC.
CNN might as well have been named the Clinton News Network for all the dodgy dealing that went on between them and clinton.

When friends — and the self — become the source

When reading online news, the closest source is often one of our friends. Because we tend to trust our friends, our cognitive filters weaken, making a social media feed fertile ground for fake news to sneak into our consciousness.

The persuasive appeal of peers over experts is compounded by the fact that we tend to let our guard down even more when we encounter news in our personal space. Increasingly, most of our online destinations — whether they're portal sites (such as Yahoo News and Google News), social media sites, retail sites or search engines – have tools that allow us to customize the site, tailoring it to our own interests and identity (for example, choosing a profile photo or a news feed about one's favorite sports team).

Our research shows that internet users are less skeptical of information that appears in these customized environments. In an experiment published in the current issue of the journal Media Psychology, a former student, Hyunjin Kang, and I found that study participants who customized their own online news portal tended to agree with statements like "I think the interface is a true representation of who I am" and "I feel the website represents my core personal values."

We wanted to see if this enhanced identity changed how they processed information. So we introduced fake health news stories – about the negative effects of applying sunscreen and drinking pasteurized milk — into their portal.

We discovered that participants who had customized their news portal were less likely to scrutinize the fake news and more likely to believe it. What's more, they showed a higher tendency to act on the advice offered in the stories ("I intend to stop using sunscreen") and recommend that their friends do the same.

These findings explain why fake news thrives on Facebook and Twitter, social media sites where we're connected with our friends and have curated our own pages to reflect ourselves. Lulled into a false sense of security, we become less likely to scrutinize the information in front of us.

We can't distinguish between real news and fake news because we don't even question the credibility of the source of news when we are online. Why would we, when we think of ourselves or our friends as the source?

S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communication & Co-Director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University

gelico wrote:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBg4gRkq8lM


#fake news ??

as she says, breitbart/rebel are the ony ones reporting on this.  while MSM discusses whether dogs should wear sweaters or whether air conditioning is sexist,,,,,

didge wrote:

So let me get this straight.

gelico wrote:


yeah, be sure to let me know if you ever do