With Dr. Stella Immanuel's viral video, this was the week America lost the war on misin... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html
social media truth facts disinformation survey psychology
shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 20
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With nearly 150,000 dead from covid-19, we’ve not only lost the public-health war, we’ve lost the war for truth. Misinformation and lies have captured the castle.
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new research, out just this morning from Pew, tells us in painstaking numerical form exactly what’s going on, and it’s not pretty: Americans who rely on social media as their pathway to news are more ignorant and more misinformed than those who come to news through print, a news app on their phones or network TV.
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“Even as Americans who primarily turn to social media for political news are less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues in the news, they are more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims.”
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Specifically, they’ve been far more exposed to the conspiracy theory that powerful people intentionally planned the pandemic. Yet this group, says Pew, is also less concerned about the impact of made-up news like this than the rest of the U.S. population.
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They’re absorbing fake news, but they don’t see it as a problem. In a society that depends on an informed citizenry to make reasonably intelligent decisions about self-governance, this is the worst kind of trouble.
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In a sweeping piece on disinformation and the 2020 campaign in February — in the pre-pandemic era — the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins concluded with a telling quote from the political theorist Hannah Arendt that bears repetition now. Through an onslaught of lies, which may be debunked before the cycle is repeated, totalitarian leaders are able to instill in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism,” she warned.
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Over time, people are conditioned to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” And then such leaders can do pretty much whatever they wish