Amid a continued public outcry over the influence of fake news and misinformation, tech companies are scrambling to generate effective solutions. … Our new research shows that fact-checking prevents misinformation from shaping our thoughts — even our automatic and uncontrollable perceptions. When fact-checking calls out what isn’t credible, much of […] Read more »
Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
… Just about every political lie that has dominated American discourse in the past two decades — the Swift Boaters and the birthers, death panels, the idea that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat but climate change does not — depended, for its mainstream dissemination, on the Fox News machine. […] Read more »
Why we’re pressing pause on political polling at the Herald and the Age
In the wash-up from last Saturday’s federal election questions are rightly being asked about how all the major public polling companies failed to predict the Morrison government’s victory. … But it’s not just the pollsters who need to reflect on their approach in the wake of this election – the […] Read more »
How the news took over reality
… In recent years, there has been enormous concern about the time we spend on our web-connected devices and what that might be doing to our brains. But a related psychological shift has gone largely unremarked: the way that, for a certain segment of the population, the news has come […] Read more »
Twitter Isn’t Real Life (if You’re a Democrat)
On Twitter during late 2015 and early 2016, Donald Trump’s front-runner status was evident, even if it hadn’t yet fully sunk in with the tribunes of conventional wisdom. Trump’s following far outstripped his rivals. His tweets drove news cycles, and channeled the resentments of a furious base. … Yet when […] Read more »
What Joe Biden Is Teaching Democrats About Democrats
… Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. … So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? … The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard […] Read more »