Lawrence D'Oliveiro
2024-12-02 21:37:36 UTC
Report on a study
<https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/12/people-will-share-misinformation-that-sparks-moral-outrage/>
into why people are more likely to pass on false reports and rumours
rather than factual ones.
Of course, given how politically-charged the issue of what is “lies”
and “truth” can be, they chose to base the credibility (or not) of
news sources, not on their own judgement, but on a more objective
measure, of how often reports from those sources were fact-checked as
false.
What they found was that, often, the people spreading the false
stories knew they were false, but passed them on anyway, on the basis
of the degree of moral outrage they provoked. In other words, they
wanted to push people’s buttons. (I suppose this is the definition of
“populism”.)
And some politicians doing this are not shy about admitting as much:
Brady pointed to an example from the recent campaign, when a
reporter pushed J.D. Vance about false claims regarding immigrants
eating pets. “When the reporter pushed him, he implied that yes,
it was fabrication, but it was outrageous and spoke to the issues
his constituents were mad about,” Brady says. These experiments
show that this kind of dishonesty is not exclusive to politicians
running for office—people do this on social media all the time.
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that “a lie can spread halfway around
the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”?
<https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/12/people-will-share-misinformation-that-sparks-moral-outrage/>
into why people are more likely to pass on false reports and rumours
rather than factual ones.
Of course, given how politically-charged the issue of what is “lies”
and “truth” can be, they chose to base the credibility (or not) of
news sources, not on their own judgement, but on a more objective
measure, of how often reports from those sources were fact-checked as
false.
What they found was that, often, the people spreading the false
stories knew they were false, but passed them on anyway, on the basis
of the degree of moral outrage they provoked. In other words, they
wanted to push people’s buttons. (I suppose this is the definition of
“populism”.)
And some politicians doing this are not shy about admitting as much:
Brady pointed to an example from the recent campaign, when a
reporter pushed J.D. Vance about false claims regarding immigrants
eating pets. “When the reporter pushed him, he implied that yes,
it was fabrication, but it was outrageous and spoke to the issues
his constituents were mad about,” Brady says. These experiments
show that this kind of dishonesty is not exclusive to politicians
running for office—people do this on social media all the time.
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that “a lie can spread halfway around
the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”?