Research: Who’s afraid of the truth about fake news?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Researchers who study misinformation confront a new problem: public scorn. And it’s not just in the form of online trolling.
These scientists are losing funding, watching their research centres close down and getting barraged with subpoenas. Given the rapid changes to news, social media and information sharing, you’d think there’d be more support for studying how people learn about the world. Instead, critics are wrongly conflating their work with censorship.
In the New York Post, for example, a story hammered a group of psychologists as concocting “fake science" to justify censorship. Their paper, published in the Nature, hit a nerve. Conservatives were found to share more information from low-quality news sites on social media than liberals did.
While the idea of news quality sounds subjective and prone to bias, the scholars didn’t make that judgement themselves. They asked three groups to weigh in: professional fact checkers, a politically mixed group of laypeople and a group of Republicans. Each group determined what was a high-quality source (a news organization that mostly gets it right, but can sometimes make mistakes) or a low-quality one (a publisher that tends to make things up).
After each group determined what counted as low-quality news, the team looked at who typically shared that type of news. Each time, they found that extreme partisans on both sides were more likely to share misleading content. And each time, those on the far right contributed more garbage.
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