Originally published at: Republicans fall for fake news more than Democrats do, according to Rand study | Boing Boing
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…says a new Rand study…
Bit on the nose there, The Universe.
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This study coming from an outfit called ‘Rand’ - even if it really has nothing to do with Ayn - is just hilarious.
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Snopes and FactCheck regularly have to debunk “satire” articles from a site called The Last Line of Defense that end up on conservative news sites and get passed around as real. It’s a weird twisted reality-- the guy is supposedly on the left and makes these fake articles to monetize conservative stupidity. Except he’s doing real harm to progressive politics and innocent people and America in general.
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Get a numeracy morans?
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Part of the problem – as I see it – is that increasingly we don’t want information, we want confirmation. We’re drawn to news sources that tell us that what we want to believe is true, not to sources that tell us what’s actually true. “Fake news” aims to fill that need: it’s polarizing content that reinforces particular world-views.
I wonder if greater susceptibility to “fake news” is correlated with a greater desire for this kind of validation, and if that need for validation is part of the psychological makeup of what you might call “the right-wing type”.
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Also, water is wet.
RAND Corp. is an old-line military-industrial-complex think tank that leans neoCon. Which still makes it hilarious.
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I sure wish researchers would stop hiding behind obscure statistics, to help folks understand the scale of the problem more. Are conservatives 10% more likely to fall for fake news (not too bad) or 1000% more likely (scary). Posting things like “Regression Coefficients (unstandardized)” are near useless in their un-interpretability… What’s the scale of the problem? Do better researchers! (data scientist here)
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I remember laughing at how a fake blogger was supposed to manipulate political reality in Ender’s Game. I guess it just took a while to actually happen.
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Also parodied in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as the “Bland Corporation.”
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“Society needs to be better at developing informed and critically thinking citizens who can appropriately process the rapid media environments in which information consumers must now operate,”
You don’t say?
Education, education, education.
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So much this.
The ranting qnut videos almost always include some emotional outburst about “dems are stupid”. This is not an actual argument, it’s just a clue about some form of inferiority complex.
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And that old line military industrial status actually is important in understanding some of their questions.
Between 2008 and 2012, did U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan kill more
enemy combatants or innocent people?
• More enemy combatants (1)*
• About the same number of each (2)
• More innocent people (3
The starred answer is listed as right in their section about verifiable facts. Every other question in the section has clear external verification, where this is verified by the people who have the most incentive to lie, have funded Rand for decades, and have recently been caught lying about this exact topic.
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This is the invisible war that has been going on in this country for a long time.
It’s why the Talibanners are so hells-bent on killing off public schools, so they can be replaced by religious private schools, a.k.a. ‘school choice’.
Those terms seem to be synonymous.
This is anathema to the FDC & their Corporate Owners, so good luck with that.
'Keep 'em Stupid & Keep ‘em Scared’ is their mantra.
Looks like the red hats really hate MSNBC, though…
Some of us are.
As for myself, the first site I go to in the morning is Drudge Report, mainly to get a feel for talking points that may be spewed that day by The Usual Suspects. There are also myriads of links to sites that are useful, and other sites I refuse to deal with.
From what I’ve seen, they seem to be increasingly authoritarian & hierarchical; meaning, they both want to tell others what to do & think, as well as be told what to do & think.
They are driven by fear: fear of death, fear of uncertainty, fear of The Others… and on and on.
That validation makes 'em feel safe.
EDIT:tyop
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A bit harsh on the Guardian there. Distrusted by everyone. Is it just that no-one in the US has heard of it?
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The Guardian isn’t very well known in the US, and it’s hard to tell with UK papers whether it’s a tabloid or not just from the name.
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Interestingly, the Rand Corporation, the Department of Defense’s research group went from the subject of left wing conspiracy theory to something somewhat progressive.
They support climate change research and provided research against a trans ban in the military. I guess because the right wing has become so fact/science averse…
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