this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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[Misleading] First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news (phys.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by somefool to c/science
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Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a "resilience" ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.

The paper

Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it's worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).

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[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 14 points 1 year ago

You are totally right. It mostly tests whether you are up to date on the current news stories in the "correct" part of the world.

What's making this worse is that "Government Officials Have Manipulated Stock Prices to Hide Scandals" is classified as a fake news headline. That might be true in the US, but here exactly this happened. Or at least they tried and failed. Someone working for a big state pension fund was gambling with the fund's money and when she lost a lot of it, she tried manipulation to win the money back, which failed.

The right way to discern fake news from real news (apart from maybe really obvious examples) is to read the article, check the sources and compare with other sources.

In 2013 a headline like "Putin about to start a decade-long war in Europe that will cause a world-wide financial crisis" would have been a ridiculous clickbait fake news headline.

Same with "The whole continent is not allowed to leave their homes for months due to Chinese virus" in 2019.

Or "CIA is spying on all internet users" in 2008.

And yet these things happened.

Because what makes fake news is not whether it is outlandish that something like that could happen, but instead it's fake news because it hasn't happened.