A healthcare worker at the Jackson Health Systems receives a Pfizer-BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine from Susana Flores Villamil, RN from Jackson Health Systems, at the Jackson Memorial Hospital on December 15, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
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Murthy has recommended that tech companies redesign their algorithms so that search and recommendation systems don’t surface reckless misinformation, and to make it easier for people to identify and report misinformation. The problem with this approach is that most people are bad at spotting misinformation.“In general people are not that good at identifying fake news,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, told VICE News. Tucker and his colleagues have been running a large scale study on people's ability to identify the veracity of fake news in real time, and their findings don’t exactly inspire optimism.“When we showed ordinary citizens stories that had appeared online in the past 24 hours that had been assessed as false by professional fact checkers, fully one-third of respondents thought the stories were true—and only one-third correctly identified them as false,” Tucker said.
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