fake news

And the science paper that claimed so has been retracted. A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”: “The paper found that even though individuals may prefer to read and share “quality information”, factors such as “information overload and limited attention” contributed to “a degradation of the market’s discriminative power”. In other words, Qiu and colleagues concluded, quality material and the rate at which it spreads across the internet “reveals a weak correlation”. Low quality material – fake news, complete rubbish – is just as likely to go viral as the Read More ›

Last year, David Klinghoffer offered some thoughts on fake news about controversies in evolution in popular media that bear repeating: The supposedly objective investigative news site ProPublica hit all of them — codes, creationism, Kitzmiller v. Dover — in a recent article, going after then-Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, who had mentioned “critical thinking” in her appointment hearing. When a colleague and I challenged their reporting, focusing on a distortion of our education policy that could be verified by published documents on our website, an editor brushed us off, claiming it came down to a “matter of opinion and debate, not fact.” I’ve documented my correspondence with the editor, which I found very revealing. I might have let it drop Read More ›