What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it? These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating […] Read more »
How We View Our Reality Shapes Our Politics. But Facts Still Matter.
… The claim that perception is reality has long been a maxim in politics. That’s particularly true as it relates to the economy. And with the 2020 presidential election ramping up, how Americans feel about their financial well-being, and the country’s, has come to the foreground again. But is perception […] Read more »
Blame Fox, not Facebook, for fake news
Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris and Hal Robert, three scholars affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, have a new book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” presenting major new research about the political consequences of American media. I asked Benkler, who is the Berkman professor of Entrepreneurial Legal […] Read more »
Fundamentalists Are More Likely to Fall for Fake News
Precisely two years after the election of President Donald Trump—a contest stained by deliberately inaccurate information that was shared and weaponized on social media—America has not yet come to grips with the issue of fake news. How it spreads is a central issue, but an even more basic question is […] Read more »
The Age of Post-Truth Politics
… It is possible to live in a world of data but no facts. Think of how we employ weather forecasts: We understand that it is not a fact that it will be 75 degrees on Thursday, and that figure will fluctuate all the time. Weather forecasting works in a […] Read more »
Debunking Donald Trump won’t work if you repeat what he got wrong
The same infographic kept appearing in my Twitter feed again and again around Thanksgiving. The graphic, originally shared by Donald Trump, showed a series of statistics about race and gun deaths in 2015, alongside an image of a dark-skinned man with a handgun. Every single one of the statistics in […] Read more »