Fake news agenda

If you needed something else to feel discouraged about, a study released this week in the journal New Media & Society found that fake news and political clickbait sites had twice the effect on the media landscape in the United States as legitimate sources and fact-checking sites.

Authored by Chris J. Vargo, Lei Guo, and Michelle A. Amazeen, "The Agenda-Setting Power of Fake News: A Data Analysis of the Online Media Landscape From 2014 to 2016" looks at not only the influence that fake news has on politics and culture, but how difficult it is to fight it.  The authors write:

Journalists have little ability to proactively fight fake news. Even worse, partisan media can be susceptible to its influence.  Other news organizations fight fake news. The BBC, for instance, has announced a commitment to debunk fake news that is shared widely on social media Fact-checking organizations have become another bulwark against fake news with PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, ABC News, the Associated Press, and Snopes all fighting it on Facebook.  However, this reactive desire to thwart fake news has required traditional media to divert resources—in the form of time and attention—to fighting it.  What is worse, by being forced to respond to fake news journalists may be affording fake news websites with the ability to push topics, issues, and even attributes into the public agenda.

The worst part of all, of course, is the fact that many of these partisan media sources wield tremendous influence over voters' understanding of the issues:

The relationship between fake news and partisan media is worthy of particular attention. Instead of valuing balance, fairness, and objectivity, partisan media often frame stories in a way to advance certain political agendas driven by in-group or tribal identification.  Traditional partisan media include cable news (e.g. Fox News) and talk radio (e.g. the Rush Limbaugh Show).  The Internet has contributed to the proliferation of new forms of partisan media: partisan websites and blogs such as Drudge Report and Daily Kos.  With the emergence and popularity of social media services, partisan news coverage is more popular than ever before.  Moreover, these social media networks facilitate the spread of misinformation via automated, anonymous accounts which target users already engaged in conversation on a particular topic.

Crown that with our current administration's tendency to shriek "Fake news!" whenever there's a news story they don't like, and you have a complete political clusterfuck, and one that I see no way out of any time soon.

Lead author Chris J. Vargo isn't much more optimistic than I am.  "Fact checkers largely were independent in what they chose to cover, but their topical focus didn’t really translate very well to other media," Vargo said.  "The media landscape isn’t listening to fact checking as much as it is to fake news, which is particularly troublesome...  I think the big thing that I’m realizing across these studies is that anything can distract us."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is that exaggerated, sensationalized, or outright false headlines are much more likely to grab our attention than are headlines about the actual issues, which (by comparison) are often boring.  Add to this a heaping helping of confirmation bias -- our tendency to believe with little evidence things that conform to our preconceived notions -- and it's no wonder that the folks who detested Hillary Clinton's politics fell for the whole idiotic "Pizzagate conspiracy" last fall.

Vargo remains optimistic, however, and cites the fact that even in the face of partisan media and fake news sites, the responsible and balanced media have soldiered on even in the face of repeated attacks.  "Our study found that to a small degree, yes, fake news does influence what the press talks about." Vargo said.  "But largely, the press has the ability – and maintains the ability – to cover the issues that are most important to a society today."

Of course, covering the important issues and getting the voters to listen are two entirely different things.  Encouraging people to stop paying attention to such serial offenders as Fox News and Daily Kos, and to get their information from places like BBC, is proving to be pretty difficult.  After all, once you have a government leader convince you that 99% of what you hear on the most reliable media sources is fake, and that fact-checking sites are biased and unreliable, you are set up to believe damn near anything.

So unfortunately, I don't share Vargo's optimism.  I think the last vestiges of my positive attitude toward people's ability to think critically were shattered when Fox News persuaded the evangelical Christians to support a sociopathic serial adulterer who lies every time he opens his mouth, claiming that he was the perfect embodiment of the Ten Commandments.

After that, I don't hold out much hope for the collective brainpower of humanity.

The fact of the matter

A couple of days ago I made the mistake of participating in that most fruitless of endeavors: an online argument with a total stranger.

It started when a friend of mine posted the question of whether the following quote was really in Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes a Village:

It isn't, of course, and a quick search was enough to turn up the page on Snopes that debunks the claim.  I posted the link, and my friend responded with a quick thanks and a comment that she was glad to have the straight scoop so that she wasn't perpetuating a falsehood.  And that should have been that.

And it would have been if some guy hadn't commented, "Don't trust Snopes!!!"  A little voice in the back of my head said, "Don't take the bait...", but a much louder one said, "Oh, for fuck's sake."  So I responded, "Come on.  Snopes is one of the most accurate fact-checking sites around.  It's been cross-checked by independent non-partisan analysts, and it's pretty close to 100% correct."

The guy responded, "No, it's not!"

You'd think at this point I'd have figured out that I was talking to someone who learned his debate skills in Monty Python's Argument Clinic, but I am nothing if not persistent.  I found the analysis I had referred to in my previous comment, and posted a clip from a summary of it on the site Skeptical Science:

Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist who has written a number of books on urban legends and modern folklore, considered the site so comprehensive in 2004 as to obviate launching one of his own.[10] 

David Mikkelson, the creator of the site, has said that the site receives more complaints of liberal bias than conservative bias,[23] but insists that the same debunking standards are applied to all political urban legends.  In 2012, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes’ responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases.  FactCheck noted that Barbara Mikkelson was a Canadian citizen (and thus unable to vote in US elections) and David Mikkelson was an independent who was once registered as a Republican.  “You’d be hard-pressed to find two more apolitical people,” David Mikkelson told them.[23][24]  In 2012, The Florida Times-Union reported that About.com‘s urban legends researcher found a “consistent effort to provide even-handed analyses” and that Snopes’ cited sources and numerous reputable analyses of its content confirm its accuracy.[25]

And he responded, "I disagree with you, but I respect your right to your opinion."

At that point, I gave up.

But I kept thinking about the exchange, particularly his use of the word "opinion."  It's an odd way to define the term, isn't it?  It's an opinion that I think single-malt scotch tastes good with dark chocolate.  It's an opinion that I detest the song "Stayin' Alive."

But whether Snopes is accurate or not is not an opinion.  It is either true, or it is not.  It's a little like the "flat Earth" thing.  If you believe, despite the overwhelming evidence, that the Earth is anything but an oblate spheroid, that is not "your opinion."

You are simply "wrong."

Now, I hasten to add that I don't think all of my own beliefs are necessarily correct.  After all, I haven't cross-checked Snopes myself, so I'm relying on the expertise of Brunvand et al. and trusting that they did their job correctly.  To the best of my knowledge, Snopes is accurate; and if anyone wants me to think otherwise, they need to do more than say "No, it isn't" every time I open my mouth.

But to call something like that an "opinion" implies that we all have our own sets of facts, even though many of them contradict each other, with the result that we all do what writer Kathryn Schulz calls "walking around in our little bubbles of being right about everything."  It's a little frightening how deep this mindset goes -- up to and including Donald Trump's shrieking "Fake news!" every time he hears something about him or his administration that he doesn't like.

I can understand wanting reality to be a different way than it is.  Hell, I'd rather teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts than biology in a public high school.  But wishin' don't make it so, as my grandma used to say, and once you grow up you need to face facts and admit it when you're wrong.  And, most importantly, recognize that the evidence won't always line up with your desires.  As President John Adams put it, "Facts are stubborn things.  Whatever our wishes, inclinations, and passions, they cannot alter the facts and the evidence."

Andrew Jackson was half African, and other urban legends

Did you know that daddy-long-legs have an incredibly poisonous venom, so poisonous that they'd be the most deadly spider in the world, except their mandibles are so weak that they can't pierce human skin and inject it into you?

Did you know that you shouldn't throw rice at weddings, because birds will eat it, and then it will swell up in their stomachs and their stomachs will rupture and it will kill them?

Well, if you answered "No," good, because as it turns out, neither of these is true.  The first one still makes the rounds despite its being entirely false -- not only did Mythbusters debunk it, but technically, daddy-long-legs aren't even true spiders (they belong to an arachnid group called "harvestmen").  As far as the birds, if that were true, it would make it hard to explain why there are a number of bird species who are major pests in rice fields -- they are presumably not taking the rice they steal home and cooking it in tiny rice pots before serving.

These old-wives'-tales, or urban legends, or whatever you want to call them, are still out there, and I still periodically get asked about them by students.  But we have one advantage, these days, as compared to when I was young -- we now have the internet as a giant fact-checking device.

I've done a good bit of railing against the internet as being a conduit for bullshit, but used properly, it does have one truly wonderful function; if you have access to a computer, you can get nearly instantaneous access to information for the purpose of verifying claims.  For example, take a look at the following website, "The Seven Black Presidents Before Obama," which (despite being written in 2008) is still circulating today.  (In fact, I just saw it for the first time two days ago as a Facebook post.)

In case you don't feel like reading it, the gist is that there were seven earlier US Presidents -- Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and a pre-George-Washington guy who was supposedly the first actual president, a gentleman named John Hanson -- who had significant amounts of African ancestry.  And we're not just talking about one African ancestor way back; the site claims that Andrew Jackson, for example, was the son of an Irish woman by an African American father.

Well, the whole thing set my skepti-senses ringing immediately.  For one thing, among the "evidence" given (if I can dignify it by that name) is that Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor," and we all know that "Moor" is an old name for North Africans.  (If that's the way it worked, I suppose President Bush was descended from a hedgerow.)  Now, if this had been handed around thirty years ago, and you doubted it, your only recourse would have been a painstaking search through the encyclopedia, or, failing that, a trip to the library.  As for me, it took me a grand total of fifteen seconds to find this page -- wherein each of the claims is analyzed, to be summed up as follows:  "Historians' and biographers' studies of these presidents have not supported such claims, nor have the claims above been peer-reviewed.  They are generally ignored by scholars."  (They also note that Coolidge's mother's maiden name, Moor, can not only mean "dark or swarthy," but also refers to a geographical feature common in the British Isles, and that there are tens of thousands of people named Moor(e) who aren't of African descent.)

The whole John Hanson thing, by the way, seems to be an outright fabrication that conflates John Hanson of Maryland (a Caucasian who was the president of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution) with a John Hanson who was an African American who went to Liberia in the 1800s and served as a senator there.  The two were (obviously) different men.  [Source]

So, the bottom lines is that we have even less excuse these days for (1) not checking what we're told, and (2) believing bullshit.  Now, that's not to say that there isn't lots of bullshit out there on the internet.  For example, 95% of the nonsense I rail about daily on this blog comes from the 'web.  But there's an easy solution; the simplest way to find the good stuff is to append the word "skeptic" or "debunk" after what you're searching for on Google.  That's what I did with the "Black Presidents" thing -- I just Googled "Seven Black Presidents Before Obama Debunk" and it brought up the page I linked above (and also a Snopes.com page that had basically the same information).

Anyhow, that's my musings on critical thinking for today.  It looks like, in fact, Barack Obama really is the first African-American president, unless you count the fact that in reality we're all from Africa if you go back far enough.  It did get me thinking, though, that what'll be even more interesting is if the College of Cardinals selects an African pope, which is looking like a possibility.  Wouldn't it be cool to have the Catholic Church not run by an old, homophobic, bigoted white guy?  An old, homophobic, bigoted black guy would be at least a step in the right direction.

The straight scoop

As part of our ongoing inquiry into why people believe in irrational, counterfactual nonsense, last week we looked at a study that showed that if people read nasty comments in an online opinion piece, it caused them to hold onto their preexisting opinion more strongly.  Today, we'll consider a study that shows that not only does an obnoxious screed not change someone's mind, facts don't, either.

R. Kelly Garrett, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, recently released the results of an investigation into how people react when they are told that something they'd just read was wrong.  He and his team gave test subjects a story about who has access to private health records, but the story had several false statements inserted into it -- for example, that hospital administrators, health insurers, and government officials had unrestricted access to your medical information.

The group was then split in three.  One-third was given, immediately after reading the article, a second article from FactCheck.org that showed that the inserted statements were wrong.  A second group was given the correction after spending three minutes doing an unrelated task.  The third group was not given the correction at all.

Unsurprisingly, the three-minute waiting period had little effect on whether or not the reader ended up believing the false information, and the people who did not receive correction showed the strongest residual belief in the incorrect statements.  What was interesting, though, was how the data shifted when you looked at the individuals who received correction, and split those into two groups -- ones who at the beginning of the study identified themselves as supportive of electronic health records, and ones that were against them.  The ones who thought that electronic health records were a good idea were very quick to accept correction, and to learn that the scary statements about unrestricted access were false; those who already believed that electronic medical recordkeeping was a bad idea did not budge, even when shown evidence that what they'd been told was false.  Instead, Garrett said, the test subjects doubted the source of the correction itself.

 "Real-time corrections do have some positive effect, but it is mostly with people who were predisposed to reject the false claim anyway," Garrett said.  "The problem with trying to correct false information is that some people want to believe it, and simply telling them it is false won’t convince them."

That doesn't mean we should give up, Garrett said.  "Correcting misperceptions is really a persuasion task.  You have to convince people that, while there are competing claims, one claim is clearly more accurate."  He also said that it provides a cautionary note about rumors in the political arena.  "We would anticipate that systems like Dispute Finder would do little to change the beliefs of the roughly one in six Americans who, despite exhaustive news coverage and fact checking, continue to question whether President Obama was born in the U.S."

He summed up his study as showing that "Humans aren’t vessels into which you can just pour accurate information."

While this is a purely natural result -- it's understandable that it would take a lot of convincing to change someone's mind on an issue (s)he felt strongly about -- it's a little disheartening.  It's no wonder, then, that the conspiracy-theorists seem so deaf to reason, that the anti-vaxers and anti-GMO crowd don't budge even in the face of scientific study after scientific study, and that the woo-woos respond to rational argument with the equivalent of "la-la-la-la-la, not listening."  It makes the job of the people at sites like FactCheck and Snopes that much harder.

Not to mention mine.  And it also explains a good bit of the hate mail I get.