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Research Establishes 13-Hour Gap Between Viral Misinformation and Correction (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in China and America will soon launch a platform called Hoaxy, designed to identify and analyze what happens when misinformed news goes viral, and the processes which lead to a correction of the misinformation. The study, which compared 71 likely and prominent sources of inaccurate internet news over a period of three months to the same news stories on fact-checking sites, concludes that the average interval between viral diffusion of inaccurate news and the discovery of facts which disprove it stands at about 13 hours. Hoaxy uses a custom crawler written in Python and diffused via the Scrapy web crawling framework.
It takes truth 13 hours to get its boots on.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
A particular information is that the "correction" often fails to travel as far as the original misinformation. There are plenty of examples of this, though a particularly effective case study is the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, where a number of early pieces of misinformation on both the perpetrators (outcasts, "trench coat mafia", third-shooter) and the victims (specific targeting of individuals, religious martyrdom) went viral gained traction and remain part of the popular perceptions of the event today, despite having been disproved and corrected shortly after they were issued. Simply put, the misinformation was a better and "more comfortable" story than the truth (which is often the case - reality has a nasty habit of being messy, while our brains seem to like tidy stories).
On that basis, this looks like a worthy study. That said, given the Chinese connection, I do have to wonder whether this study isn't just going to be a vehicle for proposing blanket media-censorship.
generalized/averaged time gap between misinformation and correction is practically useless, given the variety of, types of information, news sources, content of news and false news, and methods of correction, ( not to mention differences in languages, culture, internet penetration and habits, co-relation with offline media, etc).
given all that, time gap for each correction event , plotted on a graph, will spread thinly all along the time axis. averaging such data is absurd and meaningless.
to be useful the variety mentioned above needs to be narrowed to specific categories. for instance, financial misinformation and correction about companies ina industry listed in a particular stock market reported in a specific group of news sources.
The time difference between China and the US is also 13 hours. Coincidence?
13hrs is also the delay between a post appearing on /. and a duplicate post appearing.
The amount of garbage that I see posted on Facebook that is not only blatantly wrong but you-should-know-better-so-I-assume-dishonesty wrong is incredible in some places. My favorite example off the top of my head is the meme showing a pie chart with the federal budget that shows the military at 60% of the budget and some self-righteous line to the EBT piece that says "Republicans thinking cutting this will balance the budget." Well, guess what, that pie chart is the discretionary budget. That part is about 20% of the entire federal budget. Those of us who actually know enough about the government that our founding fathers wouldn't be embarrassed to let us vote actually notice things like "WTH are Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment and servicing the national debt?"
The majority just lap that garbage up. Left or right and in between. Doesn't matter. The more it confirms their biases, the more their brains shut down.
If Facebook wanted to censor something useful instead of legitimate German outrage over the complete disregard for popular opinion on the migrant issue, they could start with a lot of the "political" pages on Facebook that spread more dezinformatsiya than a Soviet state TV station on coke.
If you feel the researchers didn't go far enough, contact them and offer them funding to continue their research. I'm sure they'd be delighted at the prospect.
So now I've got to wait 13 hours to find out if this stories bogus? :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I"ll just wait the thirteen hours until this article is proven false. But then it might be right if it's proven false.... my head hurts
I hope someday true research is done on how that very nasty rumor about Rod Stewart ended up traversing the world several times over before there were even mobile phones, let alone ubiquitous Internet access.
Hey, AC. I saw you bashing that town as much as anyone else. You should apologize first!
Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. CONFIRMED.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Soon we will have some nutjob claiming that any news story older than 13 hours must be true.
By this time tomorrow, someone else will have linked to this post to support that claim.
...13 hours before I believe that hoaxy is real.
There is a saying, attributed to Mark Twain in 1919: "A lie will travel halfway around the world, while Truth is putting on her shoes."
The attribution is somewhat doubtful, since Twain died in 1910. But still a quotable quote.
It's more likely to be 12 or 14.
Those of us who actually know enough about the government that our founding fathers wouldn't be embarrassed to let us vote actually notice things like "WTH are Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment and servicing the national debt?"
You're one of them too.
I'm only posting this cause it's the THIRD TIME THIS WEEK (well... last seven days) that I'm seeing this same "not only blatantly wrong but you-should-know-better-so-I-assume-dishonesty wrong" parroting.
Only this time comical numbers are made to be someone else's fault.
But with the same fallacy of equating trust funds (paying for social programs - where people ENTRUST a part of their paycheck to the government in return for various forms of insurance later) and direct expenditures (paying for defense NOW) parts of the budget.
I.e. Equating savings for a rainy day and spending on guns which (should that particular rainy day come) will quickly prove to be obsolete and will be bought again, several times over - and forever paying for the human costs of past wars.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."