The “echo chamber” distraction: Disinformation campaigns are the problem, not audience fragmentation.

Abstract

The importance of the arguments made in "Beyond misinformation" (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017) is difficult to underestimate. Recognizing that the current crisis of faith in empirical evidence and in the value of expertise has roots that reach far beyond individual-level psychological processes is a crucial step in countering it. As the authors note, there are a host of social, technological, and economic factors that contribute to the situation we face today, and accounting for these interdependent forces will enable stakeholders, including scientists, journalists, political elites, and citizens, to respond more effectively.Further, the authors clearly articulate why scholars must engage in politically charged debates. The argument that political motivations are driving the emergence of a "post-truth" world has ample precedent: rumors and lies have been used to shape public opinion throughout human history (Allport &

An agent-based model about the effects of fake news on a norovirus outbreak

“…Distrust in conventional authorities is closely linked to tendency to believe in conspiracy theories (CTs) [24]. The best predictor of belief in a specific CT or domain of CTs is pre-existing belief in a CT [25,26]. CTs are relevant to believing bad advice, because fake news stories often use conspiracy theories to allege that conventional advice or conflicting information should be disregarded.…”

“…The phenomena that people choose how and from whom they receive information has been termed "filter bubbles" [26]. These bubbles work to discourage alternative viewpoints.…”

“…1) Provide counter-information that is equally or better evidenced, or more persuasive [2,26,[63][64][65][66] 2) Tax the advertising or tax the profits of products sold via misinformation [67] 3) Drown bad info with good information [67] 4) Regulate information [26], possibly impose civil or criminal liabilities [2] which could lead to explicit censorship [2,26] 5) Revise financial models available to fake news disseminators (incentives) to stop encouraging production and sharing of false (or even just very salaciously written) stories over truth and accuracy [3,22,28,66] 6) Labelling (reliability rating or counter-arguments provided) by news provider [2,22,26,66] 7) Encourage individuals to actively strive to make their own filter bubbles more diverse [26] 8) 'Immunise', recipients to disregard fake news (education-based strategy) [68] We don't model effects of intervention strategy 1 because the results are predictable; eg., good advice as contagious as bad advice is what happens in our stage 1 scenario (no net changes would result), and otherwise any changes will be linear responses if good advice increases without a reduction in bad advice. Pragmatically, we reduced strategies 2-8 to two basic interventions in stage 3 models, as described below.…”

‘Fake News’ in Science Communication: Emotions and Strategies of Coping with Dissonance Online

“…The latter is information that is incorrect, possibly given by accident, but not created with the intention of causing harm, whereas disinformation means intentionally false information that is often used for spe-cific communication strategies, such as damaging the reputation of a person, social groups, organisations or countries (cf. Garrett, 2017). Among these are so-called 'fake news.'…”

Fisuras en la cámara de eco en tres procesos electorales

“…Sin embargo, desde una perspectiva crítica y una exhaustiva revisión a las anteriores investigaciones que constituyen una visión hegemónica sobre las cámaras de eco, en "The 'Echo Chamber' Distraction: Disinformation Campaigns are the Problem, Not Audience Fragmentation" 4 (Garrett, 2017), se sostiene lo siguiente:…”