Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It
Scientific Americanscientificamerican.com
Saved by sari
Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It
Saved by sari
Destructive cherry-picking spreads fear and pessimism, and over the past 20 years, it’s been steadily on the rise.25 In political media, this can have especially dangerous consequences. Geographic sorting means many people barely spend time with anyone on the other political side, so the only information they have on what those people are like come
... See moredirect our societies are far too smart to ban news; they just give us ever more of it so that we will lose any ability to see what is really happening.
But if the facts were elusive, the digital world had transmitted half-truths and lies at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable even a decade earlier. The patient work of journalists to take time to discover what actually happened was buried in the avalanche of rumour – and then invisible except to the relatively tiny minority who stil
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