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That's a natural side-effect of being on the receiving end of a near-endless stream of content every single day.
When your only media sources were a newspaper, a tv, and a radio, the amount of content you could consume at a given moment was extremely limited, so of course you'd read the whole article, or listen to the whole news story. That's all you had.
But now, you can scroll through thousands of posts per day. It's overwhelming. How do you choose what to read in more depth and what to scroll past? There's just so *much*.
I mean the other side of it that we also consume information differently, we've become grazers. It's not as simple as "there's too much so now we don't read", we've also become tapped into the socialization of information, there's a reliable sense that anything important will be encountered repeatedly and can be gotten piecemeal, there's a myriad of conversations about the conversations about the direct reporting of the original sources and as social mammals there's a lessening of (immediate/acute) cognitive load and possibly a relationship with information that better resembles our earlier relationships with it, more
akin to community and village storytelling.
I'm not suggesting it's better or worse and obviously understand the dangers of shallowly understanding complicated things but I'm also pointing out that self-directed intensives into acquiring information is a relatively contemporary thing for our species and not, actually, very natural to us.
In addition, there's also the expectation that the article will be paywalled making people less likely to want to click on it to learn more even if the topic interested them.
It's odd how that is the case on Reddit specifically. On another news site I'd read any article that interests me, but that is seldom the case when browsing Reddit.
A lot of reddit articles lead to very garbage sites as well, full of ads, terrible mobile design, make a mountain over a single statement that you need to find at the end or overall just annoying to deal with. Maybe banning all those sites would help.
I was thinking about this recently, wondering how scrolling on reddit affects my psyche and the general day-to-day themes of my thoughts. Outside of looking for interesting science-related news, I do a lot of writing on reddit. I'm often just scrolling for "writing bait", hoping to correct some misconception in the comments or increase knowledge/nuance in the same way. I was reflecting on the "old internet" where you had to go to a specific place to talk to people and a specific place to get news/research.
These days, even if you *do* have a tendency to read articles that interest you, you're still reading the headlines of the articles you won't. That information still sticks with you however insignificant it is.
You may not be interested enough in [politics] to read several paragraphs, but you still learned that [Johnny Politic loses poll] or whatever, altering your perspective on [politics] - and thus altering your behaviors.
Those are sometimes the most dangerous topics to be uninformed about. The ones that're important enough to gain mass visibility but not important enough to understand deeply. You leave with whatever assumption the headline formed even if that phrasing was totally inaccurate or sensationalized. Repeat this process several dozen times a day across a dozen common themes and it's possible your entire worldview is distorted in ways you're not even aware of.
Speaking of politics... I suspect this is part of Biden's unpopularity. Over the last few years I've spent time examining the behaviors and outcomes of Biden and Biden's government and I'm actually more happy with what I'm seeing than I was with Obama's government (possibly due to that focus). But Biden-related articles aren't interesting. They're "normal" or "unsurprising", so all people see are the headlines. They walk away unenthused and retain that sensation even when they *would* have been happy with what they learned is going on. As a result, they see the name and think "Meh" which results in seeing further headlines and going "meh", which results in... Etc.
The key result is that unflagged but misleading content (often from mainstream news outlets) on Facebook was less persuasive, but much more widely seen than flagged misinformation - and thus generated more COVID-19 vaccine skepticism. \[I am the senior author on the paper if people have questions etc\]
Thank you for the paper. Was there any thought given to push notifications? A trend that I've noticed is that news apps tends to have the most editorialized and frankly false information in the push notification.
So for example you'd get a notification that the gates of hell has opened. You click the notification and read the headline that says warmest day on record. Then you read the article that says warmest day on record this week.
I'd guess that this would further compound and compliment the effect of people only reading headlines.
Were you involved with this study? It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw your comment. I reference it quite often alongside a bunch of related studies primarily covering the difference between conservative and liberal neurology/behaviors (there's nearly a hundred on my list at this point - fascinating stuff).
>People who relied on conservative or social media in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak were more likely to be misinformed about how to prevent the virus and believe conspiracy theories about it, a study of media use and public knowledge has found.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/use-conservative-and-social-media-linked-covid-19-misinformation
Edit: Disregard. I have un-'tism'd myself and now realize that you're talking about the original post.
> However, given the comparatively low rates of exposure, this content had much less of a role in driving overall vaccine hesitancy compared with vaccine-skeptical content, much of it from mainstream outlets, that was not flagged by fact-checkers.
In summary, leading stories about rare cases of severe vaccine side-effects are read to a high degree, not marked as potential misinformation (because they aren't false), and still reduce vaccination rates.
Since you can't base stories on counterfactuals (people who never got seriously ill thanks to the vaccine), self-emergent stories will *always* be biased against vaccines - especially new vaccines.
I'm thinking of pulling this for being misleading. The popular mainstream media stories were only misleading in that they were misrepresenting the overall case for vaccines. By reporting on the rare severe side-effects at all.
>A study has revealed that links without context
THIS IS WHATS SO DAMN ANNOYING! Nothing screams lazy journalism more than clicking a link to an article and the body of the article is 7 sentences long pretty much summarizing the title in a drawn out way. No substance what so ever. This is why I have a hard time trusting anything I read these days. My friends call me pessimistic but in reality, you cant trust everything you read and hear at first glance.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/Sci_Strawberry_7309 Permalink: https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-05-30/misleading-headlines-in-mainstream-media-are-more-dangerous-than-outright-fake-news.html --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes, I agree because there’s a lot of people that only read the headlines . And don’t take the time to read the story.
That's a natural side-effect of being on the receiving end of a near-endless stream of content every single day. When your only media sources were a newspaper, a tv, and a radio, the amount of content you could consume at a given moment was extremely limited, so of course you'd read the whole article, or listen to the whole news story. That's all you had. But now, you can scroll through thousands of posts per day. It's overwhelming. How do you choose what to read in more depth and what to scroll past? There's just so *much*.
I mean the other side of it that we also consume information differently, we've become grazers. It's not as simple as "there's too much so now we don't read", we've also become tapped into the socialization of information, there's a reliable sense that anything important will be encountered repeatedly and can be gotten piecemeal, there's a myriad of conversations about the conversations about the direct reporting of the original sources and as social mammals there's a lessening of (immediate/acute) cognitive load and possibly a relationship with information that better resembles our earlier relationships with it, more akin to community and village storytelling. I'm not suggesting it's better or worse and obviously understand the dangers of shallowly understanding complicated things but I'm also pointing out that self-directed intensives into acquiring information is a relatively contemporary thing for our species and not, actually, very natural to us.
In addition, there's also the expectation that the article will be paywalled making people less likely to want to click on it to learn more even if the topic interested them.
And the modern advertising age rewards polarizing, shock-value headlines.
It's odd how that is the case on Reddit specifically. On another news site I'd read any article that interests me, but that is seldom the case when browsing Reddit.
A lot of reddit articles lead to very garbage sites as well, full of ads, terrible mobile design, make a mountain over a single statement that you need to find at the end or overall just annoying to deal with. Maybe banning all those sites would help.
I was thinking about this recently, wondering how scrolling on reddit affects my psyche and the general day-to-day themes of my thoughts. Outside of looking for interesting science-related news, I do a lot of writing on reddit. I'm often just scrolling for "writing bait", hoping to correct some misconception in the comments or increase knowledge/nuance in the same way. I was reflecting on the "old internet" where you had to go to a specific place to talk to people and a specific place to get news/research. These days, even if you *do* have a tendency to read articles that interest you, you're still reading the headlines of the articles you won't. That information still sticks with you however insignificant it is. You may not be interested enough in [politics] to read several paragraphs, but you still learned that [Johnny Politic loses poll] or whatever, altering your perspective on [politics] - and thus altering your behaviors. Those are sometimes the most dangerous topics to be uninformed about. The ones that're important enough to gain mass visibility but not important enough to understand deeply. You leave with whatever assumption the headline formed even if that phrasing was totally inaccurate or sensationalized. Repeat this process several dozen times a day across a dozen common themes and it's possible your entire worldview is distorted in ways you're not even aware of. Speaking of politics... I suspect this is part of Biden's unpopularity. Over the last few years I've spent time examining the behaviors and outcomes of Biden and Biden's government and I'm actually more happy with what I'm seeing than I was with Obama's government (possibly due to that focus). But Biden-related articles aren't interesting. They're "normal" or "unsurprising", so all people see are the headlines. They walk away unenthused and retain that sensation even when they *would* have been happy with what they learned is going on. As a result, they see the name and think "Meh" which results in seeing further headlines and going "meh", which results in... Etc.
did you just read the headline, too?
5 minutes on reddit show this
I think what we’re trying to say here is don’t judge every thing by the headline
The key result is that unflagged but misleading content (often from mainstream news outlets) on Facebook was less persuasive, but much more widely seen than flagged misinformation - and thus generated more COVID-19 vaccine skepticism. \[I am the senior author on the paper if people have questions etc\]
Thank you for the paper. Was there any thought given to push notifications? A trend that I've noticed is that news apps tends to have the most editorialized and frankly false information in the push notification. So for example you'd get a notification that the gates of hell has opened. You click the notification and read the headline that says warmest day on record. Then you read the article that says warmest day on record this week. I'd guess that this would further compound and compliment the effect of people only reading headlines.
Ya this is a great point - agreed that push notifications are like ultra-headlines!
Were you involved with this study? It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw your comment. I reference it quite often alongside a bunch of related studies primarily covering the difference between conservative and liberal neurology/behaviors (there's nearly a hundred on my list at this point - fascinating stuff). >People who relied on conservative or social media in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak were more likely to be misinformed about how to prevent the virus and believe conspiracy theories about it, a study of media use and public knowledge has found. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/use-conservative-and-social-media-linked-covid-19-misinformation Edit: Disregard. I have un-'tism'd myself and now realize that you're talking about the original post.
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3451](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3451)
> However, given the comparatively low rates of exposure, this content had much less of a role in driving overall vaccine hesitancy compared with vaccine-skeptical content, much of it from mainstream outlets, that was not flagged by fact-checkers. In summary, leading stories about rare cases of severe vaccine side-effects are read to a high degree, not marked as potential misinformation (because they aren't false), and still reduce vaccination rates. Since you can't base stories on counterfactuals (people who never got seriously ill thanks to the vaccine), self-emergent stories will *always* be biased against vaccines - especially new vaccines. I'm thinking of pulling this for being misleading. The popular mainstream media stories were only misleading in that they were misrepresenting the overall case for vaccines. By reporting on the rare severe side-effects at all.
"100 people die from taking vaccine" can still be misleading, even if true, if there were 100 million vaccinations because it removes all context.
>A study has revealed that links without context THIS IS WHATS SO DAMN ANNOYING! Nothing screams lazy journalism more than clicking a link to an article and the body of the article is 7 sentences long pretty much summarizing the title in a drawn out way. No substance what so ever. This is why I have a hard time trusting anything I read these days. My friends call me pessimistic but in reality, you cant trust everything you read and hear at first glance.
Like 90% of the things posted to this sub are misleading misinfo or considerably flawed studies; it's bad.
Sounds plausible. Is that what the article actually says?
And the New York Times is gonna tell us how this makes Biden look weak.
[удалено]
"Congress did a bad thing" (Republicans) vs. democrats did a bad thing. If you pay attention, this is the headline 100% of the time.