College week 4/5/6 Flashcards
What is a high choice media environment?
-> there are so many news platforms we can choose from nowadays, so the choices for consuming the news are quite unlimited.
The 3 Fs (Roberts 2018):
Fear: the government is practically doing something
Friction: Authorial governments can also try to block opposing online content
Flooding: The government is posting a lot, so it is hard for you to encounter those dissenting voices.
Who is to blame for the fake news?
People with a lot of followers can easily reach a lot of people. This is not caused by the centrality of poster.
Who profits from fake news?
Political gain:
- Politicians can discredit opponents, stir up emotions
- Anti-system politicians / rogue actors’ profit from uncertainty and doubt
Monetary gain:
- At least 235$ spent on ads on fake news sites
- Low income per site, but very cheap to set up
- Fake news can easily generate a lot of clicks
- Response from ad companies might be to block ‘long tail’ of news sites
What can we do about fake news?
- Fact checking
- Government to step in and regulate
- Educate people, media literacy
- Change the algorithms, make them more transparent, get rid of the bad one
How quickly does true/false news spread on Twitter?
- What are the causes of this?
False news spreads faster than true news, probably because it is more sensational, spread by bots or trolls farms that intentional spread these things in order to have political effects and it specifically target to people who have a lot of followers so it is easy to reach a lot of people.
So:
- false news spreads faster than true news
- This is not caused by the centrality of the poster
- False news seems more newsworthy
- Easily replicate this study
How does this generalize to other social media and other countries?
This is difference than Facebook, in the way people use Facebook, how they engage with Facebook. The sharing behavior would be different, we care about our human behavior: Facebook can be sharing with friends, while Twitter mostly is sharing with a big anonymous public.
The deliberate spreading of untrue news is:
Fake news & misinformation
(Disinformation is deliberate spreading of untrue news in order to achieve a political effect, spreading fake news in order to win the election.)
According to Vossoughi et al, what explains the faster spread of false news?
False news is:
- More novel than true news
- False news has influenced politics
- Affected stock market
- Hindered emergency
What can stop fact-checking from working (according to Lazaer et al)?
- Selective exposure: people avoid fact check if it is counter attitudinal.
- Desirability bias: people reject fact check if it’s counter attitudinal
- Confirmation bias: fact check comes after messages and people reject news that goes against what they already know.
Who is to blame for polarization?
The other”
- People blame people
- Right wing blames the populist and the extremist
- People also blame politics
- Media, algorithms and the news landscape
Yang and Tian study the third person effect in Fake News.
What was the strongest mediator?
The mediators where:
Negative affect, Perceived knowledge, Self-efficacy
- Perceived knowledge, if people use Social Media a lot, they have the feeling that they know a lot about, like Covid. And there was also a weak positive effect on this third person effect. Self-efficiency to a lesser extent.
According to Prior, how does media fragmentation explain polarization?
More choice widens the knowledge gap, making people with extreme opinions more likely to vote.
Specialized cable channels reduce accidental exposure to news, increase knowledge gap,
Low knowledge reduces turnout -> Less interested people less likely to vote.
Fragmentation of the media -> rise of partisan media -> overt hostility towards out-group
Which of the statements below is a conclusion drawn by Eady et al?
Conservatives are more heterogeneous in their media choice than liberals: right is more spread out over various news sources, broader news diet
What characterizes a populist politician?
- Against everything that blocks the “people’s will’’
- Undermine trust in processes
- Increase polarization/ political ‘tribalism’
