Clickbait Goes Viral

 And that’s the point:

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

And that’s the point.

This is part of the reason people are leaving Twitter.  But the real solution is to not engage via outrage.

Yeah, that’ll happen. Eventually. When people get tired of it. Journalism was small papers appealing to specific audiences. And then there was “yellow journalism,” and then radio and movie news (yeah, I remember that) and finally TV had to appeal to mass audiences (I speak in sweeping generalities, obviously). Walter Cronkite made the Grey Lady look pinko. Seriously.

So now “citizen journalism” is selling the way yellow journalism did. But this time nobody’s going to impose rules. Moving to BlueSky is not shutting down Twitter. Not yet, anyway. And the evidence is people don’t really process “news” the way we want them to. 

There’s a local PBS show with two professors (of political science) from UH who discuss politics every week. It’s very collegial, low-key stuff. One of them is Latino, which made the discussion recently all the more interesting. He pointed out that a lot of Texas Latinos (they confine their topic to Texas politics, mostly) support border control because they see themselves as Anglo. And because they think border control is important. His point was: too many Democrats make unwarranted assumptions about Latinos, and then are surprised by electoral results. We assume we know how they think. We assume wrong.

Analysis now indicates voters for Trump remembered a better economy under him (they wiped Covid from their memory). And they really didn’t pay attention to what he said in the campaign trail; or they decided he didn’t really mean it. The rest if us (they were barely a majority) assumed we knew how they were thinking.  We were wrong.

So it’s still not as simple as “misinformation!” “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” Now, whaddya do about that? 🤨