Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
It is make your mind up time. Today is election day in the UK. Here are a few pointers to the analysis conducted by Full Fact. What was Fake News and what was actually true? We have been through a storm of political ads from all the major parties. Luckily, we also have the non-partisan … Read more
Thursday 12th Dec is Election day in the UK. Is it a nice clean election with no evidence of any manipulation at all? Er … no. Here are a few quick examples. The Punch that was not a Punch The BBC Sockpuppets are being played as usual. For example we had the “credible” report yesterday … Read more
Study reveals that exposing people to fake news creates false memories if that fake news panders to their preexisting biases and beliefs.
One part of the Facebook “solution” is to flag Fake News as Fake. This is how they describe it … Better identifying false news through our community and third-party fact-checking organizations so that we can limit its spread, which, in turn, makes it uneconomical. This leads to an interesting question. If you permit people to … Read more
Facebook issued an official policy regarding anti-vaccination misinformation within advertisements back last March. It reads as follows … Combatting Vaccine Misinformation We are working to tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and providing people with authoritative information on the topic. We are starting by taking a series of steps: We will reduce the … Read more
Did you know that Harry Houdini and Abraham Lincoln were good friends and would often meet up? For example, see the picture above. There is of course one rather glaring flaw here. Lincoln was rather famously assassinated on 15 April 1865, and Houdini was born after that in 1874. How then is a picture such … Read more
