12/4/2023 0 Comments Headline news today nprSharing without reading can also make stories look like they are gaining popularity, or trending. If people only read the headlines, they may mistakenly take what is in the headlines as fact without exploring further whether there’s doubt or another side expressed in the story. For example, the rise of clickbait relies on flashy headlines that draw attention. In terms of the spread and influence of fake news, this could be quite damaging. It’s clear that people are quite happy to share, retweet, or like things without ever having read them. More than half the time, according to computer records, a majority of people who shared the articles never clicked the link that would have enabled them to read the story. In the case of Twitter, researchers examined 2.8 million online news articles that Twitter users shared, and to which they sometimes added their own original comments. Other sites also report that many comments people post about the news articles they present come from individuals who are reacting to the headline and not the article itself. But many viewers, without reading the article, went right ahead and posted comments in response to the headline, clearly not having read the article. As a joke, NPR shared a headline on their Facebook page entitled, "Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?" If users clicked the link, they were directed to a page on NPR's website explaining that the article was a joke. Ī humorous, if alarming, example of this comes from a social experiment done by National Public Radio (NPR). An unfortunate fact about is that many people form opinions about news articles without ever having read them. The first of these biases is the tendency to rely on attention-getting signals sent by fake news pieces without evaluating the information accompanying these signals all that deeply. And fourth, persistence-there’s a weird tendency for false information to stick around, even after it’s corrected. Third, fake news takes advantage of partisanship, a very strong reflex. Second, social media’s popularity signals affect our attention to and acceptance of information. Four types of cognitive biases are especially relevant in relation to fake news: First, we tend to focus on headlines and tags without reading the article they’re associated with. Cognitive Biases and Fake NewsĬognitive biases also affect the way we use information. This seems perfectly logical to a healthy person, but overlooks the possibility of catastrophic events. A common example of this is younger people mistakenly believing they don't need health insurance because they are healthy generally. They can also make one part of our mental perspective play a disproportionate role in our thinking. They can act as blinders, leading us not to realize something that might have been apparent. At the same time, cognitive biases can cause mistakes in our thinking, too. This "automatic process" allows people to conserve mental energy for things that are more complicated. You don't need to re-learn your path from home to work or school every day, become it’s so ingrained in your mind that you can follow it without thinking. Why do people have cognitive biases? Normally, these mental shortcuts make our lives easier. This section explains how cognitive biases operate-what goes on inside people's heads that makes us more likely to fall for fake news, and for us to continue to believe false information even after it's been corrected. Cognitive biases are detours or shortcuts in reasoning, remembering, or evaluating something that can lead to mistaken conclusions. It’s due to a feature of human thinking called cognitive biases. McDaniel even tried to warn viewers by putting a disclaimer on the bottom of his web pages saying his posts "are fiction, and presumably fake news." While a handful of people took the time to email him to ask if stories were real or send hate mail, most of the comments on his links blindly accepted what he wrote as the truth. "I saw how many fake ridiculous stories were making rounds in these groups and just wanted to see how ridiculous they could get." “I continued to write ridiculous things they just kept getting shared and I kept drawing more viewers," McDaniel told PolitiFact. In less than two weeks, more than 1 million people had viewed stories on the site and spread them across social media platforms. James McDaniel said he created a fake news website…as a joke to see just how naive Internet readers could be. Why do people fall prey to fake news stories? Can't they just tell when they come across them? Having such easy access to real facts and fact checkers surely takes care of the problem, right? Unfortunately, part of the reason that fake news is such a problem is that people do fall for these stories, and being shown the facts doesn’t help correct this problem.
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