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Yup..Twitter is a retarded chat room...that millions get their news from..and use to form their opinions...often basing them on incorrect data. The Atlantic skews left...but they do tend to get the facts correct..even if you have to allow for their institutional bias. Conspiracy? Not that I've noticed.This study just bears out my long-held beliefs about social media..and those that depend on it for their information:
The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News - The Atlantic - Pocket
The article is long..and well worth reading..a small quote:
"The massive study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. “We must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century,” write a group of 16 political scientists and legal scholars in an essay also published in Science. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”
“How can we create a news ecosystem ... that values and promotes truth?” they ask.
The study suggests that it will not be easy."
Except -- Twitter is not a journal or a media outlet.. It's a retarded level chat room...
And The Atlantic really isn't completely innocent of bias and conspiracy either...