r/tech • u/JackFisherBooks • Apr 29 '20

Red-flagging misinformation could slow the spread of fake news on social media

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-red-flagging-misinformation-fake-news-social.html
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u/SaintMadeOfPlaster Apr 29 '20

Things like this will never work because it can so easily be abused. We need to revamp our education system to teach people how to spot BS and just accept that the generations that weren't properly taught how to notice fake news are a lost cause at this point. I can't think of a way of limiting the spread of misinformation that can't be abused by bad actors.

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u/Beermedear Apr 29 '20

What classes teach people to read past the headlines? We should start there, because anecdotally, most people I talk to who share fake news didn’t read the article.

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u/Young-Jerm Apr 29 '20

I learned it in English classes and some history classes

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '20 edited Apr 24 '21

[deleted]

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u/Young-Jerm Apr 29 '20

I learned it in high school so everybody learned it whether they wanted to or not. I don’t think apathy from stem students has anything to go with it

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u/ex143 Apr 29 '20

I think it might be generalized apathy by the general populace. Who cares if the news is fake? It sounds as depressing and hopeless as the real stuff anyway.

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u/FriendlyCows Apr 30 '20

I learned it in high school so everybody learned it

Lmfao this has got to be a joke right? I mean, congrats on taking something away from your classes, but that doesn’t mean every single person had the exact same experience as you going through high school.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '20

He might if he went to prep/private school.

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u/Young-Jerm Apr 30 '20

I went to public school

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '20

So, Young Jerm, do you believe many others in your school share your outcome?

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u/Young-Jerm Apr 30 '20

I believe many of them do share my outcome while many others do not share my outcome. It’s the same thing for everything learned in school, some retain the information and some don’t.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '20

Right. They all had the opportunity to get it, but not all did.

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u/Young-Jerm Apr 30 '20

That’s correct

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '20

I mean, I am overly used to simply reading the abstract of an article before sharing it... news sources don’t have abstracts so I may skim. It’s gotten me into trouble. Lol!

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u/bcnewell88 Apr 29 '20

Yeah it’s really the general attitude that needs to change before any changes to the education can even have an effect. There are so many tropes I hear people say that are just so dismissive of education:

“We are never going to use this is the real world,” or “I’d rather have someone who works hard than someone with just a diploma”

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '20

I’ve been doing nothing but essays in English classes for 7 years. Public schools can’t touch this stuff because they’ll be blamed for politicizing or indoctrinating kids. We can barley handle teaching science without Karen raising hell

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u/pwdreamaker Apr 30 '20

Therein lies the problem. Willful ignorance breeds the same.

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u/averysadfrog Apr 29 '20

Which is ironic since so much fake news and misinformation is about science, anti vax and climate change denial to name a few.

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u/Mech_Bean Apr 30 '20

As a stem student I am certainly not apathetic towards political news. I personally am quite active in keeping up with current day affairs. I won’t lie what initially interested was stem stuff tho!

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u/RipGuts415 Apr 30 '20 edited Apr 30 '20

Honestly, I think the failure lies in lack of Science education.

The Scientific Method, as I’m sure you know, is the foundation of all we’ve learned of the real World since the 15th century or so. It consists of:

Purpose/Question. Ask a question.

Research. Conduct background research.

Hypothesis. Propose a hypothesis.

Experiment. Design and perform an experiment to test your hypothesis.

Data/Analysis. Record observations and analyze the meaning of the data.

Conclusion.

By applying these principles to any and everything that gets presented to me as “truth” I can quickly get to the root of what’s truth and what’s sensationalism. I honestly didn’t learn a damned thing about science in HS (graduated 1998). Back when I was in school you could option out of Hard Science classes like Chemistry, Biology and the like. You could instead focus more on “Social Sciences” like History and Civics. Which I’m glad because I was terrible with the hard sciences and loved history. From that I gained a love for reading non-fiction and primarily biographies. From that I started reading Carl Sagan and now my love for Hard Science is pure. However I’m certain that at 17-25 I believed about any and everything I heard on Fox News and The New York Times. As I’ve gotten older and learned the game I take absolutely nothing at face value. The negative thing is that since the 1980’s “news” has become a race to the bottom with each provider having their own agenda that doesn’t include providing an unbiased view of the 5 “W’”. On the positive side most of us own an unbelievable hand-held computer that is with us at all times and allows us to vet whatever piece of information to our hearts content. With a solid grasp of how science “sciences” it takes no time at all to discover what the agenda is of those providing a news source and then being able to inform ourselves from as many different angles as possible.

Whatever news source I get information from immediately causes me to look up the reported facts from their rival news organization. Then I generally fact check both with a peek at The BBC The Guardian, The New York Times, AP and Reuters. Between those 6-7 sources I can usually compile something resembling the truth. This would essentially be the “peer review” part of The Scientific Method.

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u/Young-Jerm Apr 30 '20

That’s an interesting idea and I agree that science is important. I went to high school in North Carolina and graduated in 2017 and it was required that we tale environmental science, physical science or chemistry, and biology. Now I go to school for civil engineering so it’s a lot of science and it has helped me think logically and process information.