Researchers suggest "pre-emptively exposing" readers to a small "dose" of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims.
"Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus," said the University of Cambridge study's lead author Dr Sander van der Linden. "The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible."
The study, published in the journal Global Challenges, was conducted as a disguised experiment.
More than 2,000 US residents were presented with two claims about global warming.
The researchers say when presented consecutively, the influence well-established facts had on people were cancelled out by bogus claims made by campaigners. But when information was combined with misinformation, in the form of a warning, the fake news had less resonance.
...Even the way we use language to convey our collective fears and anxieties about the state of society seems fractured. Each of these accumulated shocks have become a kind of touchpoint for some of the cultural, social, and political trends that have emerged. For many, trust in certain public institutions—the media, the police, the government—is broken. Who can you really trust when every day there are so many wild stories—believable fake news, unbelievable true stories—of police brutality and abuse, media machinations, and propaganda as the rusty old gears of government creak onward?
"In the face of such uncertainty, if you can’t be sure what facts are real, it’s hardly any wonder that many have rejected objective facts and choose to believe what feels right, and real, to them."
Welcome to the so-called post-truth era, a scary kind of world where facts, truth, and the meaning of words may not really matter much anymore. It’s not exactly a euphemism for old-fashioned lies, as some might think, or another way of saying “truthiness.” It’s actually that facts are now somehow sidestepped as irrelevant, and there are fewer social or political consequences for public figures who blatantly mislead the public. Despite Donald Trump repeating numerous dubious statements throughout his presidential campaign, 70% of which were apparently rated untrue, he still managed to be voted into office. Like hiding a book in plain sight among other books, the cumulative effect of so many obvious falsehoods, one after another, seems to have watered down any serious consequences they might have once had for anyone daring to lie in public life.
Mialon and Mialon discuss how using indirect or figurative speech can convey a lot of the necessary information between two people who can figure out the hidden messages from context. By gauging and gaming the conversational implicatures and presuppositions that listeners are likely to make about the speech context, such as when you try and engage in such pleasantries as lying, bribery, or satire (hopefully one of those more than the others), figurative and indirect speech can be more effective than direct speech in persuading others.
"If your friend wants to buy beer and you say, “There’s a store on Third Street,” it implies there’s beer to be had there. And yet if your friend comes back and accuses you of sending him where there was no beer, you could truthfully say you never said there was."
In a post-truth era, public discourse can become muddled as words rapidly develop new meanings and connotations for different groups, increasing in unwieldy complexity. Thanks to contexts in which implicatures are key, listeners are always reading between the lines and filling in blanks for themselves, usually with their own beliefs and ideologies. And so, the gaps in understanding one another can be as wide as if we were speaking completely different languages.
One of them is The National Report which advertises itself as "America's Number 1 Independent News Source", and which was set up by Allen Montgomery (not his real name). "There are times when it feels like a drug," Montgomery told BBC Trending. "There are highs that you get from watching traffic spikes and kind of baiting people into the story. I just find it to be a lot of fun."
One of The National Report's biggest ever stories was a scare about a US town being cordoned off with a deadly disease, and as Montgomery explains they've mastered the art of getting people to read and share their fake news offering.
"Obviously the headline is key, and the domain name itself is very much a part of the formula - you need to have a fake news site that looks legitimate as can be," Montgomery says.Brooke Binkowski from Snopes, one of the largest fact checking websites which fights online misinformation, believes that while individual fake news stories may not be dangerous their potential to cause damage becomes more powerful over time and when considered in the aggregate.
"There's a lot of confirmation bias," she says. "A lot of people want proof that their world view is the accurate and appropriate one."And that idea of reinforcing people's beliefs and falsely confirming their prejudices is something that Allen Montgomery says his fake news site actively tries to exploit.
"We're constantly trying to tune into feelings that we think that people already have or want to have," he says. "Recently we did a story about Hillary Clinton being fed the answers prior to the debate. There was already some low level chatter about that having happened - it was all fake - but that sort of headline gets into the right wing bubble and they run with it."
A recent study of local TV stations in the US conducted by Adornato revealed that that nearly 40% of their editorial policies did not include any guidelines on how to verify information from social media, yet news managers at the TV stations admitted that at least a third of their news bulletins had reported information from social media that later was revealed to be false or inaccurate.
"Journalists need to get training so that they can quickly spot fakes, and people in school should learn how to read things critically online - they should learn how to research and check multiple sources online."
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