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How Online Misinformation Spreads

Misinformation is running rampant. To slow this infodemic, researchers are tracking how it spreads on social media.

Marcus Woo
Knowable Magazine
Thu, 04/01/2021 - 12:02
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This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

You may have heard the outlandish claim: Bill Gates is using the Covid-19 vaccine to implant microchips in everyone so he can track where they go. It’s false, of course, debunked repeatedly by journalists and fact-checking organizations. Yet the falsehood persists online—in fact, it’s one of the most popular conspiracy theories making the rounds. In May 2020, a Yahoo/YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Republicans (and 19 percent of Democrats) said they believed it.

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This particular example is just a small part of what the World Health Organization now calls an infodemic—an unprecedented glut of information that may be misleading or false. Misinformation—false or inaccurate information of all kinds, from honest mistakes to conspiracy theories—and its more intentional subset, disinformation, are both thriving, fueled by a once-in-a-generation pandemic, extreme political polarization, and a brave new world of social media.

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Comments

Submitted by Charles Pille (not verified) on Thu, 04/01/2021 - 09:57

No need for implanting chips

Bill Gates doesn't need to implant chips in anybody.  We all carry them around with us all the time - our phones.

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Submitted by William A. Levinson on Thu, 04/01/2021 - 16:33

Fake news is a real menace

This is an important article because a functioning democracy relies on an informed electorate, as opposed to people acting on rumors and disinformation. Fake news can spread very rapidly on social media but can and should also be challenged on social media; the latter was not possible when print newspapers had a monopoly on the propagation of news. The Hearst and Pulitzer papers published inflammatory anti-Spanish material that helped draw the U.S. into the Spanish-American War (1898) and one-sided coverage of the First World War got us into that one as well. The role of fake news in causing wars shows how dangerous it is. I think some of the conspiracy theorists are watching too many James Bond movies and believing they are real, e.g. the "space laser" was featured in Diamonds Are Forever, and the implantable tracking nanochips mentioned in this article were in Spectre.

The idea of using an R value to treat the propagation of fake news is very innovative and important, because it is an indicator of how rapidly rumors spread.

It's important to fact-check social media stories that seem too outrageous to be true before sharing them, and also to correct misinformation so the original poster can remove or correct the story.

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