Scientists claim they’ve developed a psychological ‘vaccine’ against fake news

Scientists say they’ve developed a psychological ‘vaccine’ for fake news, which can be used to inoculate the public against misinformation.

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Should misinformation be made a crime?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Should misinformation be made a crime?

Is misinformation deceiving fraudulent?

If so what level of punishment?

Rather ironic that all the click bait at the bottom of that article might reasonably be classified as “fake news”.

Telling lies is already a criminal offence in some circumstances by the way, although the chances of a successful prosecution against Facebook seem quite remote.

> In the end, they found that the general inoculation boosted participant’s accuracy in guessing the percentage of scientific consensus by 6.5 percent. With the addition of the detailed inoculation, that figure jumped to 13 percent.

Yeah. That agrees with what I suspected. Negligible.

mollwollfumble said:

> In the end, they found that the general inoculation boosted participant’s accuracy in guessing the percentage of scientific consensus by 6.5 percent. With the addition of the detailed inoculation, that figure jumped to 13 percent.

Yeah. That agrees with what I suspected. Negligible.

In fact it seems to contradict much other research showing that supplying true information can actually reinforce belief in false information.

I suspect there is an element of them finding what they wanted to find.

i’ve got a splinter in my finger