Postdoctoral research by MIT’s Sorush Wosugi has found that Twitter has become a major source of false reporting since the Official UConn Fear the future shirt moreover I love this Boston Marathon bombings.[2] Vosugi and his colleagues examined the reports using six websites, and were 95% accurate with respect to reported events. They studied 126,000 stories shared on Twitter by about 3 million people over 4.5 million times and found that fake news was 70% more likely to be retweeted than real news.[23] “False stories are also more persistent, leading to more ‘waterfalls’ or continuous retweets.” [4] So why do people retweet unconfirmed news or rumors? According to Wosugi, “People who share new information are perceived as knowledgeable… Fake news is newer and people are more likely to share new information.” [5] In an editorial in the journal Science, Northeastern University David Laser and colleagues stated that “[people] like information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, see information consistent with their pre-existing beliefs to be more persuasive than conflicting information (confirmation bias) and tend to accept information they like.”
Social media provides an opportunity to speak up for those who have no or limited means to express their views. With speed and ease of access, social media has replaced water coolers in offices, social clubs, gyms, beauty salons, front steps and park benches. as meeting places to share gossip and gossip. Unfortunately, this tendency to distrust mainstream news reports that contradict this stereotype is not limited to closest friends and family. Social media is empowering people exponentially, allowing for misinterpretation of facts and distortion of facts into New Truths. While social networks allow friends and family to communicate about the Official UConn Fear the future shirt moreover I love this most mundane and meaningless events, they are also a major source of suspicion, mistrust and hatred, no matter how baseless. There are no internal checks and balances, no rigorous fact-checking that the mainstream media goes through before their stories are printed or broadcast. Social media contributors do not have the right to disavow their posts. In fact, the opposite is true. The most notable benefit of posting on social media is speed without conscience. With enough retweets or retweets, rumors or outright lies will take on a new shade of truth. This not only reduces the value of information and news, but also reduces society’s ability to care about the truth. This further isolates and divides us into niche groups, instead of uniting what we have in common – our humanity. For me, this is the biggest loss of all.
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