Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The UK parliament has a Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee that has just published an Interim Report on Fake News. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s start with a bit of background by Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla)who wrote a great description of who they are and what they have been doing. Last Saturday … Read more
A group of researchers from Yale University have published a working paper that discusses two studies that demonstrate that some people have a tendency to be far more prone to an acceptance of Fake News than others. It is entitled “Reduced Analytic and Actively Open-Minded Thinking Help to Explain the Link between Belief in Fake … Read more
Before we dip into the context of Fake News, let’s first cover the basics. The vaccine concept is generally known but let’s repeat it anyway for completeness. A vaccine involves being exposed to a variation of a pathogen that will not actually harm you. That then stimulates your immune system into developing resistance to a harmful … Read more
A paper published by researchers at Ohio University explains that the flow of fake news might have been sufficient to enable Trump to win the 2016 election. Warning: The paper is just a research paper and is not peer-reviewed. It is interesting, but due to the lack of peer-review, I’d recommend digesting with a pinch … Read more
The term “Cambridge Analytica” has popped up and so you might perhaps be wondering what this is all about. We have a few reliable sources we can use to dig into this a bit. I’m going to strive to keep this short and simple. 50 Million Facebook profiles Essentially the claim is that 50 million … Read more
For some reason some people appear to be more susceptible to not only absorbing Fake News, but when confronted with evidence that corrects the misinformation, the Fake News tends to stick a bit. Study: Fake news’: Incorrect, but hard to correct A recent study entitled “‘Fake news’: Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive … Read more