Where do misinformation come from? | Fabiana Zollo | TEDxBari

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good evening and I would like to start from the fact

we live in a hyper-connected world

thanks to the advent of the internet and the

new technologies we are able to

communicate with people in every part of the

world and thanks to social networks

we can communicate without any kind of

temporal and spatial barriers e

what we have observed in the

last years is a real change

of paradigm

we have moved from the old context

that represented by the media

traditional television the radio the

print where the information before

reaching the public came in some

way mediated by experts in the sector

from journalists to publishers the new

context that we move in all of us

currently instead strongly

disintermediate anyone can go

online and not just access one

vastness of contents but above all

help create new ones and there is not

again only the disintermediation but

just the structure of this new one

information space in which we move

which is characterized by a presence

continuous and constant new content

in which we can often also lose the

our points of reference and the times

they are always shorter than they are almost

then canceled in a context of

this type our ability to

reflection analysis are hard

put to the test and cognitive mechanisms

we all use ourselves

habitually in our life

daily

so it’s about yesterday ‘s shortcuts

of heuristics then we put them in place

even in such a context only

that the moment we pass

from the complex to the simple we can

make mistakes

here I have just quoted a famous sculptor

constantin bronx that says simplicity

it is a resolved complexity

but let’s see what happens in the moment in

in implementing these mechanisms

our mind can deceive you

one of the cognitive mechanisms

fundamental that I will talk about is the

confirmation byas that we could translate

as byas confirms the prejudice of

that is, confirms that human tendency which

so it belongs to anyone who a

anyone who makes us select the

Information look for information

interpret them in a way that is

consistent with our system of

beliefs that we have rooted

so with ours with our whole

of our set of values with the

our vision of the world and the

confirmation myers together with others

mechanisms that play a role in the

social contagion then in the way

one influences one another

they are key elements to enable us to

better understand the phenomenon of

disinformation and also

information in particular i

eyes I speak to you about the polarization of

group that is one of the most phenomena

interesting point of view

of social influence is the phenomenon that

occurs when individuals who

they share a same vision of the world

so that they have opinions

tendentially similar in the moment in

they argue they strengthen their own

opinions will eventually come to have

a more extreme opinion from that one

the one from which they had left and another

experiment interesting experiment

of only 1955 monash in which

eight participants were asked

participants of which in reality one

only it was the subject was asked

to indicate which of the three lines in the

right card correspond to the

line on the left card now in the

first two rounds all the participants

they gave the correct answer which is that

also quite obvious in the third round

some of the participants who did

part of the experiment starts instead

go wrong answers then a

choose one of the two lines that most

short the longer one in this case the

true subject of the experiment could

change your choice

well in the first two rounds the rate of

error was about one percent in the

third round of almost 37 percent

so actually in front of the

pressure in the group we tend to

abandon the evidence of the same

our of our senses now the

combination of these mechanisms with the

hyperconnected context from which they are

matches makes this environment

particularly favorable to

diffusion of viral phenomena ai

digital wolf eyes

here I show you a map that is present in the

global risk report of 2013 of the world

economic forum

therefore in this map are indicated

the greatest geo political risks e

technology and you can see that the

massey digital bees information is

practically at the center of the

constellation

this is because disinformation

mass digital can be

particularly dangerous because it can

to negatively influence opinion

public and can have influences

negative in the real world

I ‘ll give you some examples here

the case for example jaden fifteen that is

a military exercise that you are

held in the United States and that was

initially perceived on the internet as

an attempt to obama a plot

impose martial law on states

united

to the point that the governor of the texas

Renga Bush decided to alert her

national guard

if instead of the throat after death

of two people for drinking water

salted the world organization of the

health has had to reiterate that all

hypothetical alternative cures that

they circulated online and also circulated

via whatsapp they were completely

unreliable and very dangerous or still

the case of the delegation of the ds in

South Africa for inadequate policies

sanitary there were more than 300,000

dead that could have been avoided for ds

but surely the strong strong presence

presence of the negationists has exacerbated

this situation the negationists

they claim that inoffensive Russia cai

that antiretroviral drugs cause the

disease rather than cure it then in

Italy we are not exempt

this is one of the buffaloes that

become more viral in Italy where you

he speaks of a hypothetical bill

presented by the senator to hold us for

finance funds for parliamentarians

that they were in crisis at the end of theirs

mandate

this hoax, in short, gone viral in

text there are several inaccuracies

for example the total number of

senators and different from that

expected by our constitution

yet the text went viral again

today on the senatur page, let us

there are insults from many users

Italians despite the senatur comes to us

it does not exist and is a pure character

fantasy and therefore what we have

done us as a research group is done

to try to analyze these phenomena

that are social phenomena but in a manner

quantitative then using

tools that came

from the computer science then

in the information technology that from the statistics e

then putting different together

tools to exploit all traces

digital ones that users leave on

social media on social media and in

we have dealt with it first

place to study the role of the

confirmation bias

in the mechanisms in the diffusion of the

information

so for the methodology we have it

analyzed the behavior of users in

two different and contrasting narratives

scientific fiction and narrative

pseudo scientific we have collected i

data both we have collected 2 dataset of

different faith an italian dataset with

about one million users went to 7

equivalent for the United States with

about 5 with 54 million users

both datasets cover an arc

timeframe of five years from 2010 to

2014 and the first observation the first

result was that we tried

empirically the existence of the

so-called eco chamber what are the

consciences are in the groups of bubbles in

which users with the same vision of the

world are grouped and continue to

discuss and reinforce your own

opinions

we have seen that the spread of the

information is guided by the confirmation

buyers and is guided by homophilia then

from the tendency to look for individuals

very similar to us and therefore users

they tend to form these groups

polarized and we then studied which

it was the feeling of the users

involved in these groups

these are data for the Italian dataset

and here we can see that in general the

user trend is negative there is the

average user feeling

in the social network approach it is negative

but the interesting fact is that in

when we consider users

polarized ie users who

most of them concentrate

activity

one of the two categories then in this

case you can see that negativity

increases that is, these users tend to

be even more negative

and what happens when tribe users

different then from different groups e

opposites meet then first

result is that they actually meet

very little so this interaction does not

happens and how rare though when it is

meet the discussion degenerates

absolutely there is not any kind of

dialogue and then you see that the

average sentiment as the number increases

of comments of the post then to grow

from discussion it is degenerating

then we wondered when

I try to change my mind instead

to people what happens i

attempts to banking that business

liz bufala re false information

it works or not, this is effective

we studied it on 54 million

so we have American users

collected in addition to the pages it disseminates

pseudo scientific information

scientific a third category that

of the banking and here the first result

is that usually very few users

in the amber pseudo scientific coaches

it interacts with the banking content

that is, the greatest user of the content

of banking is the user of the co

scientific chamber ie that to which

Actually the banking not serve you

however few users a few hundred

of thousands out of nine million users

few users interact with these

information and then what happens with

these users can convince them

in fact we have precisely measured the

so-called back fire effect that is

the effect of reinforcement in these practices

users after interacting with i

content of banking instead of

change your mind strengthen their on

own involvement and his own

adhesion and identity with cooking

then departure that pseudo

scientific then the banking reality

it does not seem to work and in these studies

they also had an impact on the

average

the journalist caitlin bb took care of the

column of washington post stroke fake

a column dedicated precisely to des bains

care for the fake news of the week e

after the preliminary publication of the

results of these studies decided to

close it just because it began to

feel that actually did not seem

then there will be an actual response and I

I would like to close by mentioning that cassan stand

he was in charge under the administration

obama of the regulated information office

affairs and sa stand quoted to ours

You work your article on blue blogger

assuming that probably the

best solution could be

to promote the culture of

humility and openness and therefore the idea that

I would like to go there tonight and that

we should probably all try to

get out of our consciences

so both scientists try to

get off a bit from the pedestal and

communicate better with people and in

general in our little daily is

so what we need and

also to be aware of the limits

cognitive of which we are all to which

we are all subjects and then starting

from this greater awareness we

as scholars we can instead use

the data associate patterns and try to

understand something more than all this

educational space particularly

complex thank you

[Applause]

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