Never Go Full Robot

Evaluating truthfulness of fake news through online searches increases chances of believing misinformation

Dec 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-truthfulness-fake-news-online-chances.html

Searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation.

Data voids are areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality information. They  be playing a consequential role in the online search process, sometimes leading to the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results.

But we're not here for the results, we're here for the methods:

In order to study how people use the internet to search for the truthfulness of news, these scientists recruited their participants through Qualtrics and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, "tools frequently used in running behavioral science studies".

So let's make this point now, that these half-robot, semibot, half-automated services, which apparently support some of our behavioral science research, are getting closer to full-robot because the users (the workers, the mechanical turkers) are using AI to help them do their work, and so we may see some of our behavioral science research get lower in quality over time. And you thought there was a reproducability crisis in behavioral science before!

via NYU Center for Social Media and Politics and Stanford Law School: Kevin Aslett, Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06883-y

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06883-y

Post Script:

Mechanical Turker is a word and you should probably know it.

Habitual Sharing of Misinformation is Not Inevitable

Feels like somebody's playing hardball:

Study reveals the key reason why fake news spreads on social media

Jan 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-reveals-key-fake-news-social.html

It's the algorithm, stupid. And specifically, algorithms that prioritize engagement:

Upends popular misconceptions that misinformation spreads because users lack the critical thinking skills necessary for discerning truth from falsehood or because their strong political beliefs skew their judgment.

15% of the most habitual news sharers in the research were responsible for spreading about 30% to 40% of the fake news.

"Due to the reward-based learning systems on social media, users form habits of sharing information that gets recognition from others," the researchers wrote. "Once habits form, information sharing is automatically activated by cues on the platform without users considering critical response outcomes, such as spreading misinformation."

The study's conclusions:

• Habitual sharing of misinformation is not inevitable.
• Users could be incentivized to build sharing habits that make them more sensitive to sharing truthful content.
• Effectively reducing misinformation would require restructuring the online environments that promote and support its sharing.

And the best conclusion:

"These findings suggest that social media platforms can take a more active step than moderating what information is posted and instead pursue structural changes in their reward structure to limit the spread of misinformation."

Public Service Announcement:

Business will never do something unless it increases profits, because unlike humans who need air and water and food to live, business needs only profits. Business will never do something that directly inhibits its own profit-generating activities. In this case, social media makes money from "engaging users". To expect them to stop would be to expect a starving mother not to steal food for her children. Government, and regulation, is the immune system of society. In our attempts to maintain the human race as a species, unregulated business is a parasite, not a partner. 

via University of Southern California: Gizem Ceylan et al, Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216614120

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216614120

True stories can win out on social media, study finds

Feb 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-true-stories-social-media.html

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on." Or at least that's how the saying goes. That's what we thought back in 2018 when we heard the same thing from MIT's Laboratory for Social Machines

It turns out that only held true for Twitter; on Reddit they found the opposite.

The difference? Twitter has no moderators.

And who can blame them; for that kind of money?!

Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone (June 2022)

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-unpaid-social-media-moderators-labor.html

via The Ohio State University: Robert M Bond et al, Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit, PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad018

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad018

Unrelated image credit: AI Art - Tony Montana Eating a Falafel - 2022

Dirty Datavores

As a non-partisan entity, I still can't help but think this is the hardest dig I've ever read about one of the two sides.

The best dis is one that was never meant to be, as seen here while a researcher describes the events of the past couple years in the US regarding mass psychological manipulation, i.e., fake news and Russian bots etc.; she really doesn't mean to throw the shade, but she does:

Twitter bot purge prompts backlash
Feb 2018, BBC

"Our work indicates a lot of the more conservative Americans were consuming more junk news," she explained.

"Filter bubbles and echo chambers are more dominant on the right compared to on the left.

"So, I don't necessarily think it's an attack on the right, it's just a reflection about the different ways different kinds of people consume information."

Ouch