The internet has also made it harder to figure out whether speech is getting freer or less free.
This is an interesting debate because, and this is rare, both sides have very solid and constitutional grounds. Twitter, as a company has the right to speak freely by banning accounts and removing tweets. However, is it a violation to the user's free speech if Twitter continues to censor them and amplify others with a political agenda?
As we tried to demonstrate in the two episodes, social media, and Twitter in particular, is not an ideal venue for hosting complex conversations about nuanced issues.
This wouldn't be a problem if people didn't treat twitter like a political battleground. The users don't understand that Twitter isn't meant for complex conversations.
Personally, I think it’s best viewed not as either positive or negative, but as something else: a new development in the way that power works — a development brought about by social media.
I feel like this is shift in power, away from the famous and powerful and towards clusters of people. However, these clusters are pretty quick to forget or "shiny object" as I would say. (Shiny object - they get distracted by the next big thing quickly)
Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our view
The reason big news networks don't do this is because it doesn't sell. It's sort of our fault. We voted with our wallets. (or eyes in this case)
It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about.
This happens so much because of social media posts that try to boil down pages and pages of information in a resolution or a political situation into a sentence or one picture.
At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.
Now, any time one of the students sees information further confirming their bias, I would think they would strongly believe that one two because there were right before too. If the study wasn't fake.
We found that people who engaged in more reflective reasoning were better at telling true from false, regardless of whether the headlines aligned with their political views.
I feel like there ability to tell the true from the false came from the subjects slowing down to analyze the article. It can be hard to catch misinformation when reading through for the first time. Also, you have to know your biases to counter them.
people are not as irrational as the rationalization camp contends. Recent studies have shown, for instance, that correcting partisan misperceptions does not backfire most of the time — contrary to the results of Professors Nyhan and Reifler described above — but instead leads to more accurate beliefs.
Partisan misconceptions can usually be cleared up easily by explaining yourself clearly, slowly, and logically. It's significant to this article because there are still underlying preconceptions everyone has that probably have their own political ties.
But this “rationalization” account, though compelling in some contexts, does not strike us as the most natural or most common explanation of the human weakness for misinformation. We believe that people often just don’t think critically enough about the information they encounter.
On the other hand, there is the risk of being critical to everything you read or hear due to the paranoia of getting misinformation. You may dismiss something that is true. Usually we turn this one and off with our political beliefs.