Johannes Siebert

Tag: FakeNews

  • Lies and manipulation on the internet: expert shows you two effective ways to protect yourself against fake news

    Lies and manipulation on the internet: expert shows you two effective ways to protect yourself against fake news

    Fake news is deliberately spread to manipulate opinions and, thus, elections. Fact checks alone are powerless against their public effectiveness. However, in combination with other tools, resistance to false claims can be strengthened in the long term.

    “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” declared US President Abraham Lincoln more than 150 years ago. Even though he was already vividly aware of the influence of fake news on public opinion back then, he was confident enough to believe that the truth would prevail in the end – at least for most people. Can we still share this optimism in the age of manipulation-prone internet media and their global networking?

    Despite prominent experiences to the contrary, resignation is clearly out of place. A large number of scientific studies have recently looked into the effects of fake news and developed effective antidotes. The results are cause for concern, but they also show that We are by no means defenseless against the seductive power of fake news. Perhaps just reading this article can help you react more consciously and resiliently in the future to campaigns that want to make you believe something you would never believe on your own.

    Read the full article here (in German): https://www.focus.de/experts/profi-zeigt-zwei-methoden-wie-sie-sich-effektiv-gegen-fake-news-wappnen-koennen_id_260161530.html

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  • Enhancing misinformation correction: New variants and a combination of awareness training and counter-speech to mitigate belief perseverance bias

    Enhancing misinformation correction: New variants and a combination of awareness training and counter-speech to mitigate belief perseverance bias

    Belief perseverance bias refers to individuals’ tendency to persevere in biased opinions even after the misinformation that initially shaped those opinions has been retracted. This study contributes to research on reducing the negative impact of misinformation by mitigating the belief perseverance bias. The study explores the previously proposed awareness-training and counter-speech debiasing techniques, further developing them by introducing new variants and combining them. We investigate their effectiveness in mitigating the belief perseverance bias after the retraction of misinformation related to a real-life issue in an experiment involving N = 876 individuals, of whom 364 exhibit belief perseverance bias. The effectiveness of the debiasing techniques is assessed by measuring the difference between the baseline opinions before exposure to misinformation and the opinions after exposure to a debiasing technique. Our study confirmed the effectiveness of the awareness-training and counter-speech debiasing techniques in mitigating the belief perseverance bias, finding no discernible differences in the effectiveness between the previously proposed and the new variants. Moreover, we observed that the combination of awareness training and counter-speech is more effective in mitigating the belief perseverance bias than the single debiasing techniques.

    Siebert, Jana, Siebert, Johannes U. “Enhancing misinformation correction: New variants and a combination of awareness training and counter-speech to mitigate belief perseverance bias”. PLoS ONE 19(2): e0299139, 2024, 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299139