somefool

First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news

https://beehaw.org/post/855576

First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news - Beehaw

> Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/ [https://yourmist.streamlit.app/]. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a “resilience” ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.

Jun 29, 2023 at 7:32amWeb
Show threadsomefoolJun 29, 2023

As a terminally online millennial, I was scared for a second, but I did okay on the test. Then again, I'm 40 and barely even qualify as 'millennial', and not at all as 'young'.

I found the language of the questions was glaringly obvious. What do you think?

Show threadLvxferreJun 29, 2023

I found the language of the questions was glaringly obvious. What do you think?

It’s potentially on purpose, to exploit the fact that fake news have often a certain “discursive pattern”.

Show threadwahmingJun 29, 2023
18/20, wonder which ones I got wrong.
Show threadEnglishMobsterJun 29, 2023

You can adjust your answers and hit "submit" again. I had 18/20 correct the first time, but there were 2 where I was "Well, maybe - it's just plausible enough to be a real headline."

I went back and second-guessed the two I was iffy on and got 20/20 when I hit "submit" again.

Show threadSilviecat44Jun 29, 2023
I got 18/20, but also THEY DONT HAVE AN OPTION FOR AUSTRALIA! What kind of survey has Austria and Azerbaijan but not Australia. Seriously. And you Americans love a binary scale of political preference. At least it wasn’t a required question.
Show threadcadalenJun 29, 2023
To be fair, Cambridge is British and it looks like the author of the survey is Dutch lol
Show threadSilviecat44Jun 29, 2023
It talked about all North American politics
Show threadLollerCorleoneJun 29, 2023
Where did you see an option to choose your country?
Show threadvaguerantJun 29, 2023
After you finish the survey, it asks your age, gender, country and political position (from a drop-down that goes from "Extremely Liberal" to "Extremely Conservative").
Show threadLollerCorleoneJun 29, 2023
Oh, I thought they would asking for it before the survey begins and the questions are tweaked accordingly. It isn't really fair to ask someone from the other side of the world questions solely based on US politics.
Show threadkorethJun 29, 2023
Got 20/20, was rewarded with a message, “You're more resilient to misinformation than 100% of the US population!” and looked for the Fake button because that is a mathematical impossibility.
Show threadsomefoolJun 29, 2023
Rounding error :)
Show threadvaguerantJun 29, 2023
Apparently I'm more resilient to misinformation than 100% of the UK population, but I'm not from the UK; I had to lie on the form because they didn't have my country. Turns out the real fake news was me.
Show threadSpudgerJun 29, 2023

I recall reading something about fake news and propaganda some decades ago. Can’t recall the source book but it goes like this:

If one person tells you something absolutely outrageous you won’t believe it. If a second person tells you the same story you will stop and wonder. If a third person, preferably someone you respect, tells you the same you will have no doubts about the story at all.

I have no idea how true this is but if two more people tell you the same thing…

Show threadsomefoolJun 29, 2023

That's... That was true for me, I think. I'm old, didn't always have the internet, I trusted books and family.

But I trusted books, which made me a bit of an alien in my family. And then I acquired extreme suspicion of everything when, at the same time, I started paying attention to far-right politics, and my family got sucked into far-right thinking.

Now they went full Qanon, which pretty much radicalized me. Things are so emotionally charged for me now that I have to doubt and cross-check out of sheer and absolute spite. That shit robbed me of my family and I am so, so pissed.

Show threadniktemadurJun 29, 2023
I imagine a main goal is to create a sensation of being overwhelmed, which in turn can easily make one apathetic, cynical.
Show threadsomefoolJun 29, 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

The immediate aim is to entertain, confuse, and overwhelm the audience, and disinterest in or opposition to fact-checking and accurate reporting means the propaganda can be delivered to the public more quickly than better sources.

Show threadlandwombleJun 29, 2023
I'm not sure this is a good study. I mean I scored 85% so woohoo but you just get headlines to go off. The art of noticing disinformation is in reading articles and making inferences on them. Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline but I'd imagine the article itself would fall apart on first reading. I know half the problem is people don't read articles but this is a very simplistic survey.
Show threadDarkThoughtsJun 29, 2023
Maybe they targeted redditors specifically.
Show threadvaguerantJun 29, 2023
Just took a look here, and yeah. One of the headlines they ask you to rate is "Hyatt Will Remove Small Bottles from Hotel Bathrooms". It's the kind of thing that's basically a coin flip. Without having any context into the story, I have no opinion on whether it's fake or not. I don't think guessing incorrectly on this one would indicate somebody is any more or less susceptible to miscategorizing stories as real/fake.
Show threadsabJun 29, 2023

I assume the idea is to include some pointless headlines (such as this) in order to provide some sort of baseline. The researcher probably extracts several dimensions from the variables, and I assume this headline would feed into a "general scepticism" variable that measures he likelihood that the respondent will lean towards things being fake rather than real.

Still, I'm not at all convinced about this research design.

Show threadFlyingtiger188Jun 29, 2023
I suspect that where you select on the extremely liberal to extremely conservative spectrum might have a correlation to which fake news titles you fall for. What sounds like obvious propaganda to you may sound like any news article that some may see from a more sensationalist less reliable news source, especially to those predisposed to conspiracy theories.
Show threadDessertStormsJun 29, 2023

Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline

It's exactly those "reasonable" sounding headlines (and in some cases the ideas and opinions that back them up in the body of the article, but that has to be provided for it to relevant, which as you point out isn't, which is a big problem) that serve as misinformation and/or dog whistles, so "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" could be aimed at antivaxxers (and those susceptible to being pushed there), but it's also technically correct, for example apples and bananas contain "harmful chemicals" too.
The article could be either fear mongering and disinformation - false, or science based and educational - true, but we can't know which just from the headline.

A headline like "small group of people control the global media and economy" could be a dog whistle for antisemitism - false, or be an observation of life on earth right now - truth.

My point is there are headlines that would seem like conspiracy theory to some, but irrefutable fact to others, and probably the opposite of each to each respective group, and without more than a headline (and often even with, of course), it's entirely down to the readers' existing opinions and biases.

Not a great way to test this.

Show threadsomefoolJun 29, 2023

It is, and I feel the questions are quite obvious.

That being said... I'm related to conspiracy theorists. I got a first-row seat to their dumbassery on facebook before I deleted my account. And... a significant issue was paywalled articles with clickbait titles, during Covid especially. The title was a doubt-inducing questions, such as "Do vaccines make you magnetic?" and the reasoning disproving that was locked behind the paywall. And my relatives used those as confirmation that their views were true. Because the headlines introduced doubt and the content wasn't readable. That and satire articles.

Show threadtalJun 29, 2023
A common tactic I've seen in news headlines is referencing substances that can harm a human without indicating that in the quantities that they are present, they are not a concern. I'm not sure what the right answer would be to the vaccines question given that. If that is the case there, it may be true but misleading.
Show threadsabJun 29, 2023

Not only is it not good, I'd dare to say it's awful. Never mind that the headlines themselves are terribly crafted: the entire point is that one has to be critical of sources, and not take everything at face value just because it sounds somewhat convincing. It's not about blatantly discrediting things at face value because they don't fit what you believed to be true.

By the standards of this test, headlines such as "The CIA Subjected African-Amercians to LSD for 77 Consecutive Days in Experiment" would clearly belong in the fake news category. And if it's supposed to test whether the (presumably American) respondent has decent insight into the realities of contemporary politics, why in the world would it include something as obscure as "Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality". There's literally no way of knowing without context whether the associated article would be propaganda or just an obscure piece of foreign correspondence.

MKUltra - Wikipedia

Show threadmrbubblesortJun 29, 2023
Somehow I got 100%, but it was mainly luck. I really have no clue what % support marijuana is in the US, how young Americans feel about global warming, or how globally respected they feel. I'm not from there, so I don't follow it at all. I think it would've been better if they had an "I don't know / Irrelevant to me" option.
Show threadGataZapataJun 29, 2023
I got 19/20, my girlfriend got 15/20. We both think the test design is not super good - only the headlines lead to guessing some times, where parts of article might have painted a clearer picture
Show threadjinnoJun 29, 2023
Yeah, there were a few headlines where I was like “Well… maybe? If I can’t actually read it I’ll assume false, though.”
Show threadAlteredStateBlobJun 29, 2023
Weird. The only people I know that continually and aggressively bring up very obvious misinformation are the 50+ people in my life.
Show threadsomefoolJun 29, 2023

I think the young feel immune, and that they feel socially progressive news cannot be lies because "that is not what our side does, we have ethics".

It's not true in practice, though. Fake news are used to sow division, and making people angry on both sides is part of it. The far-right, boomer fake news are more obvious because they are outlandish, but there's more than that out there.

Show threadUlu-Mulu-no-dieJun 29, 2023
That's anecdotal experience, I'm 50+ and I got 19/20, I 100% identified all fakes and marked fake one of the real ones, so I'm on the skeptical side of things.
Show threadsabJun 29, 2023
Ironically the study ignores the arguably most important part of facing fake news: being critical of sources. And as a reportedly "vulnerable" millennial myself, I have to say I'm critical of this one.
Show threadDufursonJun 29, 2023
that test is bs, first I might be gullible and the second round 17/20, the study is the fake news
Show threadachJun 29, 2023

That is such a lazy study it's pitiful and it does in no way test your ability to discern the veracity of news, so even the full marks I got are useless.

First of all, if you generate fake headlines either test someone's general knowledge or critical thinking, don't conflate the two. Secondly, it's the latter that actually matters the most, so if you build your knowledge based on headlines, you're already close to the fake news group.

Show threadaes <she/her>Jun 29, 2023

I feel like a lot of people are missing the point when it comes to the MIST. I just very briefly skimmed the paper.

Misinformation susceptibility is being vulnerable to information that is incorrect

  • @[email protected] @[email protected] It seems that the authors are looking to create a standardised measure of "misinformation susceptibility" that other researchers can employ in their studies so that these studies can be comparable, (the authors say that ad-hoc measured employed by other studies are not comparable).
  • @[email protected] the reason a binary scale was chosen over a likert-type scale was because
  • It's less ambiguous to participants
  • It's easier for researchers to implement in their studies
  • The results produced are of a similar 'quality' to the likert scale version
  • If the test doesn't include pictures, a source name, and a lede sentence and produces similar results to a test which does, then the simpler test is superior (think about the participants here). The MIST shows high concurrent validity with existing measures and states a high level of predictive validity (although I'd have to read deeper to talk about the specifics)

It's funny how the post about a misinformation test was riddled with misinformation because no one bothered to read the paper before letting their mouth run. Now, I don't doubt that your brilliant minds can overrule a measure produced with years of research and hundreds of participants off the top of your head, but even if what I've said may be contradicted with a deeper analysis of the paper, shouldn't it be the baseline?

Show threadWhirlgirl9Jun 29, 2023
i got 20/20. did i win?
Show thready0inkJun 29, 2023
Same :)
Show threadWhirlgirl9Jun 29, 2023
XD
Show threadKwakigraJun 29, 2023
I would cheat on this test because I cheat in real life. I've been humbled enough times not to put total faith in my initial impression and would rather have more evidence than whatever I happen to be aware of at the moment to determine whether a claim is true.