Brainwashing an entire population is hard work!
News consumers are more influenced by political alignment than by truth, study shows
Nov 2024, phys.org
The study is based on research conducted in 2020 with a sample of the voting-age U.S. population matched to the demographics of the census, and made up news headlines whereas earlier studies relied on existing ones. They also used a cover story about memory and communication, and even included foil questions, so that participants would not be aware of the nature of the study.Both supporters and opponents believed those that aligned with their views more than they believed true headlines that did not align with their views."We found that the strongest predictors of bias include extreme views of Trump, a one-sided media diet, and belief in the objectivity and lack of bias of a person's own political side relative to the other side."In one measure of bias, the researchers assessed people's beliefs about their political side's objectivity as compared to the other side. Ironically, those most confident in their political side's lack of bias were the most biased.In addition, the effect of partisan bias was stronger for real news than fake news. That is, people were more likely to disbelieve true information that challenged their political worldview than to accept false information that confirmed their worldview."We saw it on both political sides and even among people who scored well on a reasoning test. We were a bit surprised to see how widespread this tendency was. People were engaging in a lot of resistance to inconvenient truths.""Everyone thinks it's the other person who is the problem."But this very important point can't be overlooked, dropped halfway through the press article:One contributing factor for this state of affairs, the researchers suggest, is increased consumption of partisan media.
And just for good measure, let's recall that as of 2010 Citizen's United allows private industry to contribute campaign funds to those running for public office. (As in, who's paying for that partisan media? Yes, that's who.)
via: Department of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford: Michael C. Schwalbe et al, When politics trumps truth: Political concordance versus veracity as a determinant of believing, sharing, and recalling the news., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024). DOI: 10.1037/xge0001650
Image credit: AI Art - Close-up Yelling Into a Telephone - 2024
Brief scientific literacy interventions may quash new conspiracy theories
Dec 2024, phys.org
Americans in states with higher scientific literacy scores were less likely to believe in conspiracies and had higher COVID-19 vaccination uptake rates over the time period.
via Penn State's Smeal College of Business: Nathan Allred et al, Conspiracy Beliefs and Consumption: The Role of Scientific Literacy, Journal of Consumer Research (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucae024
A tangled web: Social media analysis suggests coordinated messaging among fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbon industries
Jan 2025, phys.org
Power rises to the top: "Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized...these different companies in different sectors are using the same strategic messaging to promote a distorted image of their environmental responsibility."
Details: 125,300 unique tweets posted from 2008–2023 by the main Twitter accounts of nine key players in the US fossil energy/plastics/agrichemical trade: ExxonMobil, Chevron, American Petroleum Institute, Dow, Dupont de Nemours, Inc, American Chemistry Council, Corteva Agriscience, FMC Corp, American Farm Bureau
via Northeastern University: PLOS Climate (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000370
New AI tool detects fake news with 99% accuracy
Jan 2025, phys.org
The method developed by the researchers uses an "ensemble voting" technique, which combines the predictions of multiple different machine learning models to give an overall score.
(Too bad we don't actually care; see above.)
via Keele University School of Computer Science and Mathematics: Patricia Asowo et al, An Ensemble Modelling of Feature Engineering and Predictions for Enhanced Fake News Detection, Artificial Intelligence XLI (2024). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-77918-3_16
Meta-analysis uncovers public's skill in detecting fake news, but skepticism towards true news persists
Mar 2025, phys.org
While their findings suggest that most people can accurately judge the veracity of news, they also showed that people are slightly better at spotting false news than true news. In other words, most of the people who took part in the studies appeared to be better skilled at rating false news as false than rating true news as true."A small majority of people show this trend (59%). The implication of this finding is that we should focus more on increasing the acceptance of true news. Currently, a lot of efforts are dedicated to making people skeptical of (false) news, however, our data shows that there may be more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of false news."
I also remember the study about how mainstream news being skeptical of a science fact are more influential than a fake news site spreading obvious fake shit, for example BBC saying there may be a small risk of myocarditis for example, even if they have a million other articles that say vaccines are safe. There is a risk of myocarditis, but the risk of dying, or becoming disabled, from Covid due to lack of vaccination is far, far higher. See here or here.
via Jan Pfänder et al, Spotting false news and doubting true news: a systematic review and meta-analysis of news judgements, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02086-1.
