Fake news and the power of confirmation bias – Vineetha Venugopal about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvineethavenugopal.in%2Ffake-ne...

vineethavenugopal.in

Fake news and the power of

confirmation bias – Vineetha
Venugopal
7–9 minutes

Internet offers pathways of enhancing democratic participation,

increased interconnectedness and access to knowledge and
entertainment. However, uncritical use of digital platforms and
uncritical consumption of digital content can impede achieving the
very goals it promises. For example, Fake news is currently a
serious threat to democracies worldwide.

Collins dictionary defines ‘Fake news’ as ‘false, often sensational,

information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. While
such sensational / false information dissemination must have been
an age-old phenomenon, the progress achieved in communication
through telecommunication and digital technologies has
exacerbated the spread, depth and impact of fake news. However,
some scholars are of the opinion that the term ‘fake news’  is a
misnomer as it is not entirely representative of the misinformation
ecosystem consisting of misleading content, satire or parody,
imposter content, fabricated content, false connection, false
context and  manipulated content. Here in this article, the term
‘fake news’  is used to indicate the entire misinformation
ecosystem including  false social media content.

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It is very easy for a sensational forwarded message to become

viral and cause real world havoc, be it mass exodus of migrant
laborers from Bangalore or mob lynching. While it would be naive
to attribute blame of these events to fake news alone ignoring the
underlying social, political and economic factors, it can’t be denied
that spread of misinformation through Whatsapp, SMS messaging
and Facebook plays a major role in inciting panic. Much has been
written about how to identify fake news. However, we may not be
able to put those techniques into practice unless we are aware of
our biases and able to counter them.

Fake news and confirmation bias

The author and her colleagues used to conduct digital literacy

sessions with a group of urban youth in Bangalore. A part of the
curriculum dealt with ways of identifying fake news. We covered
various tips such as verifying the source, verifying the date,
reverse image search, checking with fake news busting services,
etc. After multiple sessions, we conducted an assessment. One of
the questions of the assessment consisted of a forwarded image
that claimed that Kannada language was awarded the Guinness
book of records certificate for being the oldest language. The
youth was asked to verify the authenticity of this message.

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Out of the 17 youth who attempted this question, 58.8% (10 youth)
answered that the forwarded message was true without doing any
fact checking. They argued that the forwarded message must be
true because Kannada language has a rich history. We got the
impression that the bias arising from the affinity towards Kannada,
their mother tongue as well as the existing knowledge about
Kannada’s rich history, stood in the way of fact checking despite
being trained on verifying fake news. On the plus side, this incident
gave us an opening to discuss various psychological tendencies
that facilitate belief in fake news including confirmation bias.

Psychology today summarises confirmation bias as follows:

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Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on

beliefs. When people would like a certain idea/concept to be true,
they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful
thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering
information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views
(prejudices) one would like to be true

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201504
/what-is-confirmation-bias

Unsurprisingly, digital humanities scholar Jason Ahler defines

confirmation bias as ‘fake news’s best friend’. Most often, we fall
prey to fake news due to a combination of confirmation bias and
implicit bias. As psychologist David Braucher argues, due to our
implicit bias, we tend to become friends with those who have the
same political leaning as us, and as they share news that confirms
our beliefs, this feedback loop gets entrenched, and we end up
living in a bubble. Interestingly, in these bubbles we often tend to
label news that contradict our political beliefs as fake news. Other
two psychological tendencies that enable belief in fake news are
cognitive dissonance (siding with what is comfortable rather than
what is true) and motivated reasoning (scrutinising ideas more
carefully if we don’t like them and scrutinising ideas less if we like
them).

Unethical Technical Design

Another enabling factor for the spread of fake news is unethical

technical design. To retain our attention, social media algorithms
tend to give us more of what we like, thus giving them more time to
mine data about us and also to show us more ads. If you liked or

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shared an article that claimed that ancient Indians possessed

nuclear weapons, you are likely to see more such articles in your
Facebook news feed and search results. Additionally, social media
platforms keep us glued to them with likes and notifications. These
are the results of conscious design choices based on behavioral
economics built for profit maximization. Our well-being is
secondary to these platforms.

Technologist Aviv Ovadya, argues that platforms like Google,

Twitter and Facebook prioritised clicks, likes shares and
subsequent revenue generation through advertisements rather
than quality of information. This strategy resulted in polarising and
sensational information becoming more viral. Ovadya’s is one
among the increasing calls for ethical technical design. However,
due to widespread backlash, Tech companies have begun to fact
check and label fake news. For example, Twitter recently labelled
a tweet by Donald Trump as ‘manipulated media‘. However, it is
questionable how effective these steps will be considering that 1)
Not all posts are fact checked 2) Posts often go viral before they
are taken down or labelled 3) These steps still do not address the
fake news circulation via WhatsApp. While WhatsApp has
restricted the number of times a user can forward a message,  the
sheer magnitude of the fake news spread via WhatsApp groups
and private messages is overwhelming.

Ovadya further worries that the pervasiveness of fake news can

result in a scenario called ‘reality apathy’, where beset by a torrent
of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up. This can
result in people simply being indifferent to information – ‘everything
is fake news; so why bother’ or increase polarisation -‘If everything
is fake news, I might as well, believe what best suits me and decry

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other news as fake news’.

Surviving in the post-truth age

Now that the glorification of the information age has somewhat

subsided, the age we are living in is increasingly referred to as
post-truth age. Philosophers like Yuval Noah Harari would
disagree and say that fake news is an ancient phenomenon as old
as religion and humans have always lived in a post-truth
world.Whether we have always lived in a post-truth world or
whether the post-truth age has recently begun in earnest, we need
to think of ways to minimise impacts of misinformation on
ourselves and our democracies. We need to become critical and
conscious in our news consumption, be aware of our biases and
the lure of filter bubbles.

This article first appreared on Countercurrents.org –

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/fake-news-and-the-power-of-
confirmation-bias/

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