It is effective to make people think 'whether the headline of the article is accurate' as a measure against fake news.



With the spread of the Internet and the expansion of SNS, the chances of seeing news have increased dramatically, and 'fake news' has become a social problem that

can even affect the presidential election. Research results have been announced that it is useful to 'make people think whether the headlines of articles are accurate' as a countermeasure against such fake news.

Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03344-2

A remedy for the spread of false news? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://news.mit.edu/2021/social-media-false-news-reminders-0317

Distraction Helps Misinformation Spread. Thinking About Accuracy Can Reduce it. | By Jigsaw | Jigsaw | Mar, 2021 | Medium
https://medium.com/jigsaw/distraction-helps-misinformation-spread-thinking-about-accuracy-can-reduce-it-a4e5d8371a85

Gordon Penny Cook and colleagues at the Faculty of Psychology, Regina University, Canada, have shown that making people think about the accuracy of article headlines can be a countermeasure against fake news. Penny Cook and colleagues first conducted a questionnaire survey of 1015 subjects gathered by Amazon's crowdsourcing service Amazon Mechanical Turk to investigate 'how important is the accuracy of headlines'.

When sharing news on SNS, subjects are asked about the content, such as 'Surprising', 'Politically aligned', 'Funny', 'Interesting', and 'Interesting'. We were asked to rate the 5 items of 'Accuracy' on a scale of 5 from 'Not at all' to 'Extremely'. As a result, it was found that there is a strong tendency to emphasize 'Accuracy' as shown below. It was confirmed that 'news emphasizes the accuracy of the content'.



However, subsequent experiments revealed that 'when actually sharing news on SNS, accuracy is not important.' Penny Cook and colleagues showed the subject the headline of the actual news article and asked the subject what news to share.

Half of the 36 news items used in the experiment were news reports of the truth, while the other half were fake news headlines such as '500 Mexican immigrants arrested for possession of a'suicide belt''. However, as a result of this experiment, although 18.3% of the respondents answered that they 'believe in the actual news' about such fake news, the percentage of those who answered 'consider sharing' It reached 37.4%.

From the above results, it is suggested that people think that the accuracy of news is very important, and that they share fake news even though they can see through fake news with reasonable accuracy. In response to this result, Penny Cook et al. Have proposed as a countermeasure to 'think about the accuracy of the headline' using the 'priming effect' of encouraging certain actions by giving a specific stimulus in advance. It's a strategy.

Penny Cook and colleagues conducted an experiment with 5,379 Twitter users who had a history of sharing news that was judged to be 'totally unreliable' by professional fact checkers. I did. Penny Cook et al. Send the news with the words 'HOW ACCURATE IS THIS HEADLINE?' In large letters and ask the subject to think about the accuracy of the headline. I urged you.



As a result, Twitter users who were invited to think about the accuracy of the headline got the result that 'the accuracy and quality of the news to share will improve'.

Regarding the results of a series of experiments, Penny Cook et al. 'The current design of SNS, which is a mixture of serious news and emotional content and can receive immediate quantitative feedback on shared news, deprives us of the ability to think about accuracy. There is a possibility that there is. ' He argued that having people think about the accuracy of their headlines reduced the odds of sharing fake news, so proper intervention could improve the quality of the news distributed online.

in Note, Posted by darkhorse_log