Page 8 - David Rand News Today

12 hours ago From lies about election fraud to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine falsehoods, misinformation is racing through our democracy. And it is dangerous. Awash in bad information, people have swallowed hydroxychloroquine hoping the drug will protect them against COVID-19 — even with no evidence that it helps ( SN Online: 8/2/20). Others refuse to wear masks, contrary to the best public health advice available. In January, protestors disrupted a mass vaccination site in Los An...

Times Event: How to Save Ourselves From Disinformation Comedian Sarah Silverman and The Times’s Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel and Davey Alba explore how disinformation spreads, and how we can fight back. Video April 27, 2021Updated 8:07 p.m. ET Times subscribers can on Wednesday, May 26 at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific. It spreads through social media and message boards. Through television pundits and talk radio. And in daily conversations, in every corner of the world. Disinformation can ch...

Credits: Courtesy of MLK Visiting Professors Previous image Next image As Covid-19 vaccinations continue to be distributed, equity is vital to the process. Vaccination availability for individuals from minority groups is an important issue — partly because of longstanding inequitable access to quality care, and partly because of public sentiment, reflected in polls showing that Black Americans’ mistrust of health care and medical research may influence t...

 E-Mail Stopping the spread of political misinformation on social media may seem like an impossible task. But a new study co-authored by MIT scholars finds that most people who share false news stories online do so unintentionally, and that their sharing habits can be modified through reminders about accuracy. When such reminders are displayed, it can increase the gap between the percentage of true news stories and false news stories that people share online, as shown in online experiments th...

MIT Sloan study finds thinking style impacts how people use social media Critical thinkers share higher quality content and information than intuitive thinkers News provided by Share this article Share this article CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Social media has become a significant channel for social interactions, political communications, and marketing. However, little is known about the effect of cognitive style on how people engage with social media. A new study by MIT Sloa...

Credits: Image: Istockphoto images edited by MIT News Previous image Next image It is no secret that U.S. politics is polarized. An experiment conducted by MIT researchers now shows just how deeply political partisanship directly influences people’s behavior within online social networks. Deploying Twitter bots to help examine the online behavior of real people, the researchers found that the likelihood that individuals will follow other accounts on Twitter t...

MIT Sloan study finds strong evidence of political bias in formation of social media ties Democrats and Republicans equally favor interactions with co-partisans online News provided by Share this article Share this article CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- After the recent presidential election, political divisiveness is a more significant issue than ever in the U.S. But how much does political party affiliation actually impact social relationships? A recent experiment conducted o...

Researchers recently conducted a study to find a way to curtail fake news They found that fact-checking labels attached to headlines may help  The fight against the spread of false news – or fake news, as it is widely known – has been a seemingly endless battle amid the coronavirus pandemic. The government has been warning the public since the first wave of Covid-19 infections about the dangers of spreading fake news, and even regarded it as a punishable offence.  Now, researchers from th...

If social networks and other platforms are to get a handle on disinformation, it’s not enough to know what it is — you have to know how people react to it. Researchers at MIT and Cornell have some surprising but subtle findings that may affect how Twitter and Facebook should go about treating this problematic […]

Credits: Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT, with images courtesy of Twitter and Facebook Previous image Next image The battle to stop false news and online misinformation is not going to end any time soon, but a new finding from MIT scholars may help ease the problem. In an experiment, the researchers discovered that fact-checking labels, when attached to online news headlines, actually work better after people read false headlines, compared to when they precede t...