Re: Why Do People Spread Misinformation Online?

On 12/2/24 4:37 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

Report on a study
<https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/12/people-will-share-misinformation-that-sparks-moral-outrage/>
into why people are more likely to pass on false reports and rumours
rather than factual ones.
 Of course, given how politically-charged the issue of what is “lies”
and “truth” can be, they chose to base the credibility (or not) of
news sources, not on their own judgement, but on a more objective
measure, of how often reports from those sources were fact-checked as
false.
 What they found was that, often, the people spreading the false
stories knew they were false, but passed them on anyway, on the basis
of the degree of moral outrage they provoked. In other words, they
wanted to push people’s buttons. (I suppose this is the definition of
“populism”.)
 And some politicians doing this are not shy about admitting as much:
      Brady pointed to an example from the recent campaign, when a
     reporter pushed J.D. Vance about false claims regarding immigrants
     eating pets. “When the reporter pushed him, he implied that yes,
     it was fabrication, but it was outrageous and spoke to the issues
     his constituents were mad about,” Brady says. These experiments
     show that this kind of dishonesty is not exclusive to politicians
     running for office—people do this on social media all the time.
 Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that “a lie can spread halfway around
the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”?

I wonder if, given recent research on the effectiveness of counternarratives on extremist positions, we might apply this more generally to misinformation?
For example, William Allchorn, a scholar on extremist social movements, found that "[counternarrative] messages of unity that foster a sense of common human values, togetherness, and kindness worked best. In particular, it was learnt that content with a rousing, emotive, or 'feel-good' factor was preferred over more cerebral content. Moreover, if key points of content were introduced, they needed to be straightforward and present factual content that was watertight. It was found that narratives that attacked the far right, singled out or reified a single ethnicity, and were too 'political' failed to engage the audience—and led to negative reactions" (see https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803925738.00022)
Allchorn is talking about messages that successfully/unsuccessfully dial back hostile positions towards certain groups, which certainly overlaps with the type of misinformation Brady references. Might it be the case, then, that a good way to counter the misinformation's effect may be to not address it directly, but rather offer simple and straightforward counternarratives?
Curious to hear thoughts.
-World Knight