Fake News From Real

[Mugwump]

If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.

That's one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students' ability to assess information sources and described the results as "dismaying," "bleak" and "[a] threat to democracy."

As content creators and social media platforms grapple with the fake news crisis, the study highlights the other side of the equation: What it looks like when readers are duped.

The researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the country can evaluate online sources of information.

Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" ? their word, not ours ? by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.

More than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that 'sponsored content' was a real news story.

"Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there," the researchers wrote. "Our work shows the opposite."

A professional appearance and polished "About" section could easily persuade students that a site was neutral and authoritative, the study found, and young people tended to credulously accept information as presented even without supporting evidence or citations.

The research was divided by age group and used 15 different assessments. Here's a sample of some of the results:

Most middle school students can't tell native ads from articles.

The researchers showed hundreds of middle schoolers a Slate home page that included a traditional ad and a "native ad" ? a paid story branded as "sponsored content" ? as well as Slate articles.

Most students could identify the traditional ad, but more than 80 percent of them believed that the "sponsored content" article was a real news story.

"Some students even mentioned that it was sponsored content but still believed that it was a news article," the researchers wrote, suggesting the students don't know what "sponsored content" means.

Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them.

The researchers showed high school students a photograph of strange-looking flowers, posted on the image hosting site Imgur by a user named "pleasegoogleShakerAamerpleasegoogleDavidKelly. The caption read "Fukushima Nuclear Flowers: Not much more to say, this is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects."

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford University and the lead author of the study, spoke to NPR on Tuesday.

"The photograph had no attribution. There was nothing that indicated that it was from anywhere," he said. "We asked students, 'Does this photograph provide proof that the kind of nuclear disaster caused these aberrations in nature?' And we found that over 80 percent of the high school students that we gave this to had an extremely difficult time making that determination.

"They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact."

Many high school students couldn't tell a real and fake news source apart on Facebook.

They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact.

Sam Wineburg, lead author of the study

One assessment presented two posts announcing Donald Trump's candidacy for president ? one from the actual Fox News account, with a blue checkmark indicating it was verified, and one from an account that looked like Fox News.

"Only a quarter of the students recognized and explained the significance of the blue checkmark, a Stanford press release noted. "And over 30 percent of students argued that the fake account was more trustworthy."

Most college students didn't suspect potential bias in a tweet from an activist group.

The researchers sent undergraduate students a link to a tweet by MoveOn about gun owners' feelings on background checks, citing a survey by Public Policy Polling.

They asked students to evaluate the tweet and say why it might or might not be a good data source.

More than 30 percent of students thought a fake Fox News account was more trustworthy than the real one.

"Only a few students noted that the tweet was based on a poll conducted by a professional polling firm," which might make it a good source, the researchers wrote.

At the same time, less than a third of students cited the political agenda of MoveOn.org as a reason it might be a flawed source.

And more than half of the students didn't even click on the link within the tweet before evaluating the usefulness of the data.

Most Stanford students couldn't identify the difference between a mainstream and fringe source.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which publishes the journal Pediatrics, has more than 65,000 members and has been around since 1930.

Less than a third of students thought MoveOn.org has a political agenda that might justify skepticism about its data on gun owners.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) split from AAP in 2002, over objections to parenting by same-sex couples. ACPeds claims homosexuality is linked to pedophilia. It's classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which estimates that ACPeds has about 200 members.

In an article in Education Week, Wineburg and his colleague Sarah McGrew explain that they directed Stanford undergrads to articles on both organizations' sites. The students spent up to 10 minutes evaluating them, and were free to click links or Google anything they liked.

"More than half concluded that the article from the American College of Pediatricians ... was 'more reliable,' " the researchers wrote. "Even students who preferred the entry from the American Academy of Pediatrics never uncovered the differences between the two groups."

You can see in-depth examples of some of the exercises ? including sample responses ? at the study's executive summary.

The project began before the recent uproar over the prevalence of fake news online. But its relevance is immediately clear.

Wineburg told NPR on Tuesday that the study demonstrates that U.S. classrooms haven't caught up to the way information is influencing kids daily.

"What we see is a rash of fake news going on that people pass on without thinking," he said. "And we really can't blame young people because we've never taught them to do otherwise."

In fact, as Wineburg and McGrew wrote in Education Week, some schools have filters directing students to valid sources, which doesn't give them practice learning to evaluate sources for themselves.

The solution, they write, is to teach students ? or, really, all Internet users ? to read like fact checkers.

That means not just reading "vertically," on a single page or source, but looking for other sources ? as well as not taking "About" pages as evidence of neutrality, and not assuming Google ranks results by reliability.

"The kinds of duties that used to be the responsibility of editors, of librarians now fall on the shoulders of anyone who uses a screen to become informed about the world," Wineburg told NPR. "And so the response is not to take away these rights from ordinary citizens but to teach them how to thoughtfully engage in information seeking and evaluating in a cacophonous democracy."

[waterboy]

Neeto, I think the same is pretty much true about Geography, History and several other subjects supposedly "taught" in schools.

I thought this to be the crux of the article.
"And we really can't blame young people because we've never taught them to do otherwise."

[wallace]

Yep, the art of manipulating people has surpassed many people's ability to distinguish between the credible and the incredible. If you aren't skeptical your head is easily filled with nonsense.

Another part of the debate: the danger of having 'authorities' telling us what is trustworthy and what is not...

"Major Internet companies, such as Google and Facebook, are being urged to censor such articles and to punish alleged violators. Also, teams of supposedly ?responsible? news providers and technology giants are being assembled to police this alleged problem and decide what is true and what is not.

"But therein lies the more serious problem: who gets to decide what is real and what is not real? And ? in an age when all sides propagate propaganda ? when does conformity in support of a mainstream ?truth? become censorship of reasonable skepticism?"

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/18/what-to-do-about-fake-news/

[LizStreithorst]

I admit to having seen the pic of the weird flowers and believing it was true

[Mugwump]

"But therein lies the more serious problem: who gets to decide what is real and what is not real? And ? in an age when all sides propagate propaganda ? when does conformity in support of a mainstream ?truth? become censorship of reasonable skepticism?"

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/18/what-to-do-about-fake-news/

..yeppers....a slippery slope there for sure...

[Mugwump]

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/20/barack-obama-facebook-fake-news-problem



Barack Obama, facing the imminent handover to his bombastic successor, has plenty to be concerned about this week. But he took the time to express his concern about the impact of fake news online when he spoke to reporters on Thursday.

Obama, who was described in a detailed New Yorker interview as being ?obsessed? with the problem since the election, described the new ecosystem of news online in which ?everything is true and nothing is true?.
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?In an age where there?s so much active misinformation, and it?s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television, where some overzealousness on the part of a US official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere, if everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won?t know what to protect,? he told reporters in Berlin on Thursday. ?If we can?t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.?

Obama is not exaggerating. Worse yet, in the last weeks of the US election campaign, according to an analysis by Buzzfeed News, fake news ? whether claiming that the Pope had endorsed Trump, or that Clinton sold weapons to Isis ? actually outperformed real news on the platform, with more shares, reactions and comments.

Another widely shared story used a young picture of Donald Trump with variations on a quote he reportedly gave People magazine in 1998. ?If I were to run, I?d run as a Republican. They?re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they?d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.?

Yet Trump never said that. It is not even possible to know how widely the quote was shared, with a new version created every time another is flagged, and removed. Memes like this replicate across the internet like a virus in this way, so the quote, tantalising in its plausibility, is pitch-perfect for quick sharing.

    As long as Mark Zuckerberg refuses to understand his own system, there is no hope for Facebook reforming itself
    Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

Facebook has faced many controversies in its 12 short years, but has fumbled with the gravity and impact of its editorial power in an age where 62% of US adults now turn to social media for some or all of their news, according to the Pew Research Centre.

In the early days of the election, Facebook was criticised for what was perceived as overzealous curation of its ?trending topics? chart. When conservative outlets accused the site of censoring right-leaning news stories, Zuckerberg fired the trending stories team and replaced them with an algorithm ? which almost immediately began to distribute fake news.

The problem went unaddressed. Sources told Gizmodo that high-level meetings in Facebook have been underway since May, when a planned update to identify fake news to Facebook?s news feed was shelved after it was found to disproportionately impact right-wing sites, though Facebook officially denies this happened.

Part of the problem, experts say, is that many people share articles based on the headline alone and don?t even read the story ? let alone apply any skepticism to the claims within.

Another viral story by ?the Denver Guardian? claimed, completely falsely, that an FBI agent investigating Clinton had been killed in a house fire in Colorado. It prompted the Denver Post ? a newspaper that does actually exist and was founded in 1892 ? to explain that ?There is no such thing as the Denver Guardian?, pointing out that address it listed as its base led to a tree in a Denver carpark.
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In one way, the problem is not a new one. Publications like the National Enquirer in the US have long bent the truth, often shamelessly. But now, a fake story can much more easily masquerade as real because in Facebook?s walled garden, all the posts look largely the same ? a New York Times investigation alongside a fake story claiming Taylor Swift endorsed Trump.

The ease of deception has given birth to a brand new cottage industry. In November Buzzfeed discovered that many of the pro-Trump fake news sites ? over 100 of them ? were being operated as for-profit click-farms by Macedonian teenagers.

By 5 November, Facebook?s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was facing mounting pressure to address the problem. ?Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,? he wrote on his Facebook page. ?The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.?

Experts say this statement sounds like Zuckerberg is in denial. ?As long as Mark Zuckerberg refuses to understand his own system, there is no hope for Facebook reforming itself,? said Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

?Facebook and its leaders have consistently applauded themselves for connecting millions of people around the world and enabling friction-free conversation, and have gladly taken unwarranted credit for pro-democracy movements in different parts of the world,? he said. ?And yet Zuckerberg himself has denied any moral responsibility for the fact that Facebook has helped poison American democracy.?
Facebook has faced criticism in the wake of the presidential election for its role in the distribution of fake news stories.
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Facebook has faced criticism in the wake of the presidential election for its role in the distribution of fake news stories. Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images

This weekend Zuckerberg openly acknowledged for the first time the gravity of the problem and the steps Facebook is taking to counter it.
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?We take misinformation seriously,? he wrote in a post on Saturday. ?We know people want accurate information. We?ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.?

Zuckerberg said they were working to make it easier for users to report a story as fake. He also said Facebook has ?reached out? to ?respected fact-checking organizations? about third-party verification, but didn?t provide specifics.

The problem isn?t just limited to the latest US presidential election cycle, Vaidyanathan said. ?The harmful information that spreads on Facebook includes the myths and lies about vaccination and links to autism. It contains myths and lies about the scientific fact of global warming. These are issues that are crucial to our wellbeing, and there is no algorithm that can distinguish a fact from a lie.?

On Monday, Google and Facebook both announced that they would be making it harder for fake news sites to make money via their advertising networks ? though this does not address Facebook?s news feed problem.

Pressure continues to grow, even from within Facebook itself. A report emerged on Monday that a ?renegade? group of ?more than dozens? of Facebook employees had formed a task force, kept secret from upper management, to try to address the issue. ?[Zuckerberg] knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season,? an employee, speaking anonymously, told BuzzFeed. Hundreds more had privately expressed dissatisfaction with how the company had dealt with the problem.
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Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, said she was concerned about some of the sources her students were finding and using online, so she created a Google document which lists a number of sites and which has since gone viral.

Not all of them are fake. Many are satirical sites such as the Onion or the New Yorker?s Borowitz Report, while others are news organizations whose stories are often slanted, like Breitbart on the right or Occupy Democrats on the left.

?There are things that readers can do, but there are [also] things structurally and within the culture of journalism itself that need to change,? Zimdars said. ?One thing readers can do is to read what they?re sharing, and after that if you read something and have a strong reaction to it, read more about it rather than just accept what you originally read as complete information.?

The only solution to Facebook?s problem, according to Vaidhyanathan, is the labour-intensive human checking of facts.

?Facebook would have to hire thousands of human beings who are trained to make editorial judgments and could step in and edit news feeds,? he said. In the meantime, it?s as if Mark Zuckerberg is using some different version of Facebook unafflicted by hoax stories and misinformation. ?The rest of us know too well the corrosive power of fake news.?

[waterboy]

LOL....shoot the messenger.  It has to be true...I read it on the internet.

[Mugwump]

LOL....shoot the messenger.  It has to be true...I read it on the internet.

...crazy, ?....and they won't buy my bridge, go figure....