Fake news on Facebook is not always exposed: only 44 percent of the news was correctly identified as true or untrue in the experiment

Distinguishing fact from fake news on Facebook is harder than most people think. Users often fall into the “fake news” trap, especially when it comes to political news, which is increasing rapidly in the wake of the upcoming US presidential elections. Researchers at the University of Texas Austin (UTEXAS) came to this conclusion in a study with students. Only 44 percent of the messages were correctly identified as true or untrue.

In the study, participants were asked to read political headlines. These headlines were presented as if they were a Facebook feed. They rated only 44% correctly and overwhelmingly rated headlines that agreed with their own political beliefs as true. Accordingly, fake news was also classified as true.

Fakenews: “A real challenge”

“We are all always so convinced that we are better at debunking fake news than the average person. But that’s just not right,” said Patricia Moravec, assistant professor at the McCombs School of Business at UTEXAS http://mccombs.utexas.edu . Especially on Facebook and Co, where users are served legitimate news mixed with animal memes, family updates and paid advertising, the distinction can be “a real challenge”. “In a social media environment, we are much worse fact-checkers than we think,” emphasizes the scientist.

One reason for this lies in the attitude of the users. “When people scroll through their social media messages, their primary goal is to relax and are therefore in a more passive state of mind,” explains Moravec. This person is significantly more active and goal-oriented if he or she consciously takes time to consume daily news from a trustworthy source. In order to compensate for this difference in attitudes, portal operators should better support their users in uncovering fake news, the expert demands: “They have to find the people who are spreading untruths on their sites and no longer allow them to do so.”

Bad Facebook flag system

For their study, the researchers first had 80 students answer ten questions about their political views. Each test subject was then given an EEG headset to measure brain activity. They were then presented with 50 news reports that they were asked to assess for their truthfulness. Some of these have been marked with flags to alert the viewer that this may be a hoax.

When carrying out the experiment, the test subjects showed significantly more activity in the frontal region of the brain when news corresponded to their own political views but was marked as a hoax. “Despite this cognitive dissonance, messages that reflected one's own views were more often perceived as genuine. This shows that Facebook’s flag system is not working and needs to be improved,” says Moravec.

via Pressetext.com

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Fakenews analyzes: When celebrities allegedly advertise Bitcoin & Co


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