Why it's getting harder to study, combat fake news

By F.D. Flam / Bloomberg Opinion

Researchers who study misinformation are confronting a new problem: public scorn. And it’s not just in the form of online trolling. These scientists are losing funding, watching their research centers close down, and getting barraged with subpoenas.

Given the rapid changes to news, social media and information sharing, you’d think there’d be more support for studying how people learn about the world. Instead, critics are wrongly conflating their work with censorship.

In the New York Post, for example, a story hammered a group of psychologists as concocting “fake science” to justify censorship. It’s easy to see why their paper, published last week in the journal Nature, hit a nerve. The researchers found that conservatives shared more information from low-quality news sites on social media than liberals did.

While the idea of news quality sounds subjective and prone to bias, the scientists didn’t make that judgment themselves. The researchers asked three groups to weigh in: professional fact checkers, a politically mixed group of laypeople, and a group of Republicans. Each group determined what was a high-quality source (a news organization that mostly gets it right, but can sometimes make mistakes) or a low-quality one (a publisher that tends to make things up out of whole cloth).

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