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/PRNewswire/ The spread of inaccuracies on social media – including political "fake news," and misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines – has led to a. ....
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 Angeles, blocking life-saving shots for hundreds of people. “COVID has opened everyone’s eyes to the dangers of health misinformation,” says cognitive scientist Briony Swire-Thompson of Northeastern University in Boston. ....
Print this article I’ve been reading some of the research on the effect on turnout of various changes in the voting rules. It seems that a move to universal mail-in balloting does increase turnout at the margin, while other changes like the kind of reforms we’ve been debating in Georgia don’t make much difference one way or another. As far as I can tell, the most persuasive theory is that what really drives turnout isn’t the convenience of voting so much as voter interest, i.e., if you can get someone engaged in an election, he’s going vote no matter what the rules are. ....
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Recent months have been tumultuous for U.S. democracy, in ways that are both novel and yet also connected to conflicts seen throughout the country’s past. MIT News spoke to several of the Institute’s political scientists and historians, and asked them: What must the U.S. do to sustain the health of its democracy? Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and professor of political science: Americans must collectively affirm that democracy is “the only game in town,” and that we are now a multiracial democracy. To be sure, the path to full democracy has been fiercely contested. After Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, it was another 95 years before Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, in response to the civil rights movement. ....
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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have found that a possible way of stopping the spread of false news is through the use of fact-checking labels. ....