Apparently -- and who would have guessed? -- a lie can still make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its pants on:
Researchers at MIT ran a study showing what most people already suspected: fake news -- of any stripe -- outweighs real news in the fast-moving, sociologically "hot" environments of social media. Just like your Middle School days, exciting rumor and glittering half-truth is way more engaging than dull stuff like history, social studies or science. (And as for spelling, well... Most of our Facebook and Twitter posts would come back covered in red ink.)
Forewarned is forearmed: if it confirms your brightest hopes or deepest fears, if it's remarkably novel, you'd better check it out before you pass it along. Better see if you can independently verify it.
The truth has to walk a long, long road before it can catch up to lies, let alone give them the beating they deserve.
Update
4 days ago
4 comments:
The sad part of fake news is that, if you pay attention, the real world can be so much more entertaining.
The old adage of "you can't make this stuff up" is so true.
I think part of the problem is that humans are driven to derive patterns out of chaos,even when they don't exist. The real world, unlike fiction (fake news) does not have to make sense.
The original story. MIT took 138 years to catch up- https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/misc/trackofalie.html
Fake news,real news,who knows? My pet peeve is bad spelling. I always stressed to my kids that you can be the smartest person imaginable,but if you cannot spell correctly, that makes people think that you are an idiot.
Sorry,for those intelligent people out there that just cannot spell, but that is how the world sees it. With spell check now on most computers, there is seldom any reason to misspell words. Of course it can happen, but at least you know when you spell something wrong.
This post so strongly confirms what I want to believe that I'm not even going to click over to the linked study, I'm just gonna tweet it out right away to everyone I can reach!
Wait a second. Hmmmmm. What kind of game are you playing here?
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