confirmation bias news articles

Research and having a critical approach to information shared online can protect a user against biased views, but very few protections exist against the creation of echo chambers. Sci. It is likely that upon publishing a tweet about a new policy or event, they would see similar tweets from their friends and receive feedback that favors their own opinion. Articles from multiple sources are then displayed on the screen ranging from left-most to right-most view. Notwithstanding Corey’s persuasive arguments, I doubt that confirmation bias is the main culprit of the fake news distribution. With confirmation bias playing such a strong role in modern politics and political opinion, it’s easy to understand why it’s so challenging to have meaningful and respectful conversations with those who have opposite opinions. The design of these two nudges will be described in the next section. For example, a consumer may have a chosen favourite brand and will then seek out positive reviews of this product to help confirm that they have made the right choice. The alternative news sources are displayed directly below the original content. When the language is more subtle, we are more inclined to miss it. So … 3 This is often thought of as “cherrypicking,” although cherrypicking facts to support one’s views is usually done consciously. In order to be able to query news providers, it is necessary to summarize the input and extract only the keywords. This book will enables us to open our eyes to our own biases in a scientific and non-judgmental way. We discuss two types of nudging strategies, by presentation and by information. For example, in the context of fake news, this may include giving a label or signal about the reputability of a source or its political bias. “Digital nudging: altering user behavior in digital environments,” in Proceedings der 13. Also included on each page are questions about the excerpt and definitions of the types of media bias. The objective is to present a user with alternative information that should encourage judgement of the veracity of a news article. Consequently, the structure of the input tweet affects the relevance of the results. Pizzagate is another good example. 3. Prior to that she worked with a Bangalore based digital justice organisation. An example is shown in Figure 1. Confirmation bias is the human tendency to search for, favor, and use information that confirms one’s pre-existing views on a certain topic. Political discourse on social media: echo chambers, gatekeepers, and the price of bipartisanship. Confirmation bias is the basis of many studies, especially as we are bombarded with more information and “fake news.” In one study, researchers looked at how trustworthy people thought a news source was. Cohen, M. (2018). How to Identify Confirmation Bias: 3 Ways to Reduce Bias - 2021 - MasterClass. This Common Habit Is Hazardous to Your Marriage. In addition, an emulated environment with a web front end was created for testing the natural language processing required for the nudge. Confirmation bias. It’s important to note that confirmation bias isn’t the same as the frequency illusion. A. “Variations of the similarity function of TextRank for automated summarization,” in Argentine Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (ASAI 2015). 102, 1431. Founded in 2003, Science News for Students is a free, award-winning online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate science news to learners, parents and educators. Another enabling factor for the spread of fake news is unethical technical design. So, when I saw this meme I didn’t even question that it could not be real. They can help us question our assumptions. The second approach aims to provide information to raise awareness. Confirmation bias: Tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, and discredit information that does not support the initial opinion. Furthermore, there is potential in presenting a balanced view of related news as a solution to lowering acceptance of a singular view. View all Negative beliefs about the Democrats led some Republicans to believe a fake news story about a child sex ring being run out of a pizza restaurant with ties to the Democratic Party. Front. Do Loved Ones with BPD Care About Your Feelings? Section 5 will then detail the back-end processing that identifies the appropriate news articles with alternative framing. ACM Comput. Echo chambers arise from both the user's subconscious choice of surrounding themselves with like-minded people and the enticement by content presented by recommender systems. Available online at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/19/politics/russian-troll-instructions/index.html (accessed October 20, 2018). These experiments were made in survey form, in which participants were presented with tweets and asked to rate them on both impartiality and trustworthiness. In this case, results showed that people generally thought the view was unbalanced. Garimella, K., Morales, G. D. F., Gionis, A., and Mathioudakis, M. (2018). An additional reason for their formation is linked to both human behavior and the technical foundations of the user experience. We usually think of seeing as believing, but in this case, we don’t see what we don’t already believe. For example, a celebrity news outlet's CEO might also own a luxury jewelry company, It wouldn't be far-fetched to see that same outlet post favorable articles about celebrities wearing that designer's accessories. The strategy is a form of digital nudge, in which the user is presented with an original text together with articles showing wider context and alternative standpoints within close view. Keywords: digital nudging, fake news, confirmation bias, NLP (natural language processing), Twitter, Citation: Thornhill C, Meeus Q, Peperkamp J and Berendt B (2019) A Digital Nudge to Counter Confirmation Bias. Additionally, social media platforms keep us glued to them with likes and notifications. However, this method is labor-intensive and requires highly skilled humans and therefore does not scale. Are you open to new ideas and willing to change your mind? 4. Confirmation bias makes human beings seek information that confirms or strengthens their self-beliefs or values.[4]. Trump, J.K. Rowling, and Confirmation Bias: An Experiential Lesson in Fake News. This involves gently steering users towards adopting fact checking habits in their behavior online. D'Angelo, P., and Kuypers, J. prevalence of confirmation bias over personal bias. There is evidence that the nudge by presentation, i.e., the central idea of BalancedView in which the user is offered a spectrum of diverse articles, helps participants question the trustworthiness of politically biased information. If the reading of news on social media platforms without investigating alternatives is re-framed as a choice for belief without validation, it is possible to define an architecture around this choice. Placement of the nudge relative to original text. Surv. While having a natural tendency to be unconsciously biased is normal, those who decide to believe something because they want it to be true are using myside bias. The primary aim of the nudge is to present an unbiased view of a subject, without necessarily forcing a user to embrace it. While it would be naive to attribute blame of these events to fake news alone ignoring the underlying social, political and economic factors, it can’t be denied that spread of misinformation through Whatsapp, SMS messaging and Facebook plays a major role in inciting panic. This volume fosters understanding among the scholarly camps of framing scholars, and encourages greater clarity from framing analysts in all aspects of their empirical inquiry. This book is one of the first of its kind to address the implications of fake news for the K–12 classroom. It explores what fake news is, why students are susceptible to believing it, and how they can learn to identify it. The method presents the user with a selection of articles from a range of reputable news sources providing alternative opinions from the whole political spectrum, with these alternative articles identified as matching the original one by a combination of natural language processing and search. This selectivity can occur for multiple reasons (Metzger, Hartsell, & Flanigin, 2015), but this is the most important overarching aspect of the theory. The results of an initial user study of BalancedView suggest that nudging by information may change the behavior of users towards that of informed news readers. Consider the case of confirmation biases, a well-known psychological tendency where individuals unconsciously misperceive or distort new information to support their … These results are sorted by relevance and presented to the user. Individuals then pick out the bits of information that confirm their prejudices. Consider a user with a hard-line political belief on either side of the political spectrum. This nudge consists of a small white cross surrounded by a red background. (2014), who have considered nudges to encourage user awareness of privacy and the impact of posts on platforms. When tasked to defend your position, even if you just took it, even if you could have taken another, you tend to search for proof, pushing past a threatening, attitude-inconsistent thicket to cherry-pick the fruit of validation. One of the most common biases that we face is the confirmation bias, where we tend to believe new facts that agree with our preconceived notions distrust facts that conflict with them. We have discussed nudges as a solution approach to the combined effects of confirmation bias and the algorithms of social media platforms that may create echo chambers and feedback loops of misinformation. The desired outcome for a user should be an increased awareness of the potential political bias in an article. Program 14, 130-137. Implicit bias refers to the idea that as humans we have a tendency to group people into categories. One of the questions of the assessment consisted of a forwarded image that claimed that Kannada language was awarded the Guinness book of records certificate for being the oldest language. What it is: The confirmation bias is when you look for and only use “facts” that support your pre-existing beliefs while, at the same time, ignoring any information to the contrary. In the former case, the user is directly presented with information that might affect their judgement. In social psychology, confirmation bias (or myside bias) is defined as an inability to see your circumstances objectively. On the plus side, this incident gave us an opening to discuss various psychological tendencies that facilitate belief in fake news including confirmation bias. This affects the relevance of the results as well. Confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses and minimizes evidence to the contrary" (Boundless.com). Online we tend to associate with the people who have the same political leanings as we do. The author and her colleagues used to conduct digital literacy sessions with a group of urban youth in Bangalore. The Rolling Stone article that made national news by repreating the local story did use the term "horse dewormer" in the article. Confirmation bias happens unconsciously. Our well-being is secondary to these platforms. Psychology today summarises confirmation bias as follows: “Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea/concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. the option that was chosen on >50% of trials) ( … Consequently, words that occur repeatedly or that occur after such repeated words are more likely to have a high score and words that occur only once at the end of the input will have a low score. Subsequently, this should bring about assessment of evidence and consideration for how bias may compromise the veracity of an article. 39, 170–193. Wednesday’s Example of Media Bias is a weekly example of biased news reporting. SIGN UP FOR COUNTERCURRENTS DAILY NEWSLETTER, Countercurrents is answerable only to our readers. Everyone has bias, including the media. Nonetheless, the survey questions need further development. As the future continually unfolds, technology keeps evolving at a blistering pace. When implicit biases and confirmation biases work together, their potential to lead us astray increases exponentially. We’ve all probably had times when we’ve glossed over news articles containing facts that don’t comply with our political views, while remembering and agreeing with those that do. For example, imagine that a person holds a belief that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. We built this first version of our tool in order to establish a baseline from which to explore, in the future, different methods and algorithms with regard to their specific contributions to the task of countering confirmation bias. Do people trust news sources of questionable reputability in the presence of a nudge by information? Do people consider politically biased information a fair representation of a view, given a nudge by presentation? With confirmation bias influencing our news, there are really only two options. He had been a campaign contributor to both over the years. Moreover, audience optimization in sites like Facebook, ensures that we are fed the news we tend to read, this news further confirms our biases. And that’s very dangerous in sports betting, or any form of gambling for that matter. In section 2, we briefly discuss the mechanisms of misinformation spreading online and how social networks are the perfect platforms to accelerate this process, and we give a brief overview of related research in the field of fake news and nudge design. Bias is a part of any source of information; the issue is the degree of transparency. Available online at: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47098021. 5. In sum, the results of this initial user study suggest that users generally recognisee obviously untrustworthy news sources, and that nudging by information may influence trust judgements less than a source's obvious reputability. Technical design and the inner workings are covered in section 5, along with first evaluations of algorithm and user assessments in section 6. Mirsch, T., Lehrer, C., and Jung, R. (2017). Collins dictionary defines ‘Fake news’ as ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. The idea that people are more likely to believe information if it confirms what they already know or want to be true. Also, social networks want to improve the user experience by displaying content that the user will appreciate. By doing so, a user is given the opportunity to forge their own opinion by reading from multiple sources. He is on the Editorial Board of the journal, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Associate Editor of the blog, Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action. In the present section, we give an overview of our approach. The participant is presented with a politically biased statement and linked article, in the presence of the nudge designed in this work. When our “friends” send us fake news articles that conform to what we already believe, reflecting our confirmation bias, we are likely to buy the "information" wholesale. A participant is presented with a story from a highly reputable news source, such as the BBC. BalancedView: An Approach to Mitigate Online Bias and Misinformation, 5. • Spelling and abbreviation: The part-of-speech tagger used to identify relevant information is not robust to spelling errors and out-of-vocabulary words. Examples of Confirmation Bias Fallacy in News: The idea that the media is biased and will always report on news in a way that benefits their own agenda. Chakraborty, A., Ghosh, S., Ganguly, N., and Gummadi, K. P. (2016). (2017) (see the overview in section 2.3). This suggests that it is unlikely that a user would actively engage in the fact checking process and use the services provided by these fact checkers. confirmation bias. It simply confirmed what I already thought, and I bought it. Who has egg on his face now? We are likely to believe “facts” that conform to our beliefs. If you liked or shared an article that claimed that ancient Indians possessed nuclear weapons, you are likely to see more such articles in your Facebook news feed and search results. Previous studies have tried to classify the partiality of the media, but there is little work on quantifying it, and less still on the nature of this partiality. They can then make an informed decision on whether to believe an article based on presented alternatives. (4) Scores reflect whether a node is reachable from the start of the input text. *Correspondence: Calum Thornhill, calum.thornhill@student.kuleuven.be; Bettina Berendt, bettina.berendt@cs.kuleuven.be, Front. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to students and researchers within the social sciences, computer science, law and business studies, as well as policy makers engaged in combating what constitutes one of the most ... The day-to-day definition of nudge as defined by Thaler and Sunstein (2008) is “to push mildly or poke gently in the ribs, especially with the elbow” or, applied to an economical context, “self-consciously [attempt to] move people in directions that will make their lives better.” In a digital world, the definition is no different: the idea is to influence someone's behavior into acting in such a way that will improve his or her user experience and/or choices. How Left or Right-Wing Are the UK's Newspapers? However, it is questionable how effective these steps will be considering that 1) Not all posts are fact checked 2) Posts often go viral before they are taken down or labelled 3) These steps still do not address the fake news circulation via WhatsApp. In other words, any words for which a path can be found from the starting node will have a high score. The results support these intuitions and allow us to proceed to the more involved later questions. The aim of the nudge is to ensure that a reader of a post is not restricted to reading the original content and is instead given a balanced view of the information based on sound journalism. Welcome to the American Century – Even If It Is a Hell on Earth, Military-style Campaign To Combat Climate Change Is The Need, Says Prince Charles, Amidst Covid Rajasthan villagers hunt ‘witches’, Why Julian Assange’s Inhumane Prosecution Imperils Justice for Us All, 37 Year-Long Mockery Of Searching For The Killers Of 1984 Sikh Massacre. 4/14/2021 - NBC’s Today show baffled by lower COVID rates in reopened states. The spread of responses shows more trust than in the case of the obviously disreputable source, however, less trust is evident than in the case of the highly reputable source. A solution put forward by social networks relies on users identifying suspicious articles shared on their platforms. The articles come from trustworthy news providers and are classified into political categories. Big Data, 06 June 2019 However, we may not be able to put those techniques into practice unless we are aware of our biases and able to counter them. As those of our own group share our beliefs, they share “facts” that confirm our beliefs. Now that the glorification of the information age has somewhat subsided, the age we are living in is increasingly referred to as post-truth age. Here are some reasons why confirmation bias still exists in the 21st century. Much has been written about how to identify fake news. Figure 3. These findings are encouraging. Unsurprisingly, digital humanities scholar Jason Ahler defines confirmation bias as ‘fake news’s best friend’. Also included on each page are questions about the excerpt and definitions of the types of media bias. Key fact-checkers top working with facebook. Ricci, F., Rokach, L., and Shapira, B. Porter, M. (1980). Received: 25 March 2019; Accepted: 22 May 2019; Published: 06 June 2019. The 2016 American presidential election illustrates this phenomenon very well. This strategy resulted in polarising and sensational information becoming more viral. Written by Alasdair Gleed, Research Director. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Philosophers like Yuval Noah Harari would disagree and say that fake news is an ancient phenomenon as old as religion and humans have always lived in a post-truth world. This articles explores ways to incorporate the issue of fake news into my teaching. November 2020. The survey consisted of five individual web pages, each of which contained a screenshot of a tweet, enhanced (for questions 2, 3, and 5) by one of the two types of nudges tested, and a question regarding the trust in the news source or information. So, let me translate it into Ape for everyone. We have separated this process into three main steps: summarizing the input, querying the news providers, and displaying the results by categories. In the presence of the nudge, this opinion changed. The results of the latter also show our user sample to be quite critical from the start, which may result in a ceiling effect in that nudges do not significantly change users' perceptions. If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. A participant is presented with a story from a verified news source that is unlikely to be known as reputable or disreputable. Cornell L. Rev. How Russian Trolls Manipulated Americanpolitics. Nudges for privacy and security: understanding and assisting users' choices online. The selection of news providers is discussed in section 4. One person was so persuaded and outraged, he showed up with a rifle to investigate. • Select: For the scope of this work, we selected a nudge by presentation and a nudge by information. The distributions of responses are shown in Figures 3–6. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. Media Bias in Presidential Election Coverage 1948-2008 : Evaluation via Formal Measurement Accusations of partisan bias in Presidential election coverage are suspect at best and self-serving at worst. Technologist Aviv Ovadya, argues that platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook prioritised clicks, likes shares and subsequent revenue generation through advertisements rather than quality of information. • Fine-grained analysis of usage: This can include recording interactions in the user experience, for example measuring how much time the users spend on the page and whether they still share and propagate unreliable news after having been in contact with BalancedView. New York, NY: Routledge. Instead, a solution must be more subtle and not restrict a user from posting or reading any particular post. Fake news and the power of confirmation bias, mass exodus of migrant laborers from Bangalore, design choices based on behavioral economics, humans have always lived in a post-truth world. We need to become critical and conscious in our news consumption, be aware of our biases and the lure of filter bubbles. In so doing, they expose themselves to limited framing of events that obscures other perspectives for them. Experiment 2 participants were split according their normalised confirmation bias: , from which we also obtained a high bias group (M = 0.72±0.04) and a low bias group (M = 0.36±0.04). Does Russia Produce ‘Fake News’? Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. Homogeneous social networks allow polarization and closure to new information. In section 4, we discuss the nudging strategies considered. This can result in people simply being indifferent to information – ‘everything is fake news; so why bother’ or increase polarisation -‘If everything is fake news, I might as well, believe what best suits me and decry other news as fake news’. 4/14/2021 - NBC’s Today show baffled by lower COVID rates in reopened states. 1 Min read. A selection of trustworthy news providers. The Ecological Crisis is the Climax of Patriarchy and Religious Patriarchy – What’s Next? Despite the intellectual high ground taken by fact checkers such as PolitiFact1 and Snopes2, they do not solve the issue that is the tendency of individuals not to question the veracity of sources unless their own values or beliefs are infringed. People are often drawn to stories that reinforce the way they see the world and how they feel about certain issues. The account was verified and the article featured was produced by a reputable news outlet. Media and political professionals, as well as government officials, lobbyists, and participants in independent political organizations, will find these volumes useful in developing a better understanding of how the media and communication ... The tool is currently hosted on a free server meaning a slight delay in the initial start up. Confirmation bias is dangerous for many reasons—most notably because it leads to flawed decision-making. These phenomena together can create a vicious circle. Boston, MA: Springer, 1–35. Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. The Psychology of Confirmation Bias. Furthermore, the survey questioned whether the feature of a visual cue is useful in encouraging users to question reputability of a source. In this work, rather than detect misinformation, we propose the use of nudges to help steer internet users into fact checking the news they read online. All participants were Master students of Artificial Intelligence, and they are regular users of social media including Twitter. If more than 5 words reach a score of 10%, only the best 5 keywords are selected. They are motivated by wishful thinking. Gen. Psychol. Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011 A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title One of The ... • Deep Learning: Recent developments in Deep Learning apply to text summarization as well as other of the limitations listed above and we think that using attention mechanisms and recurrent neural networks would help generate better results. (2018) cite nudges as a reasonable solution to the problem laid out in section 2.2. In particular, future studies should rest on larger sample sizes (both of article sets and of human participants) and experimental designs that allow for more fine-grained comparisons and contrasts between the choice architectures, and which take into account further factors such as demographics, as well as order effects. Then, share the feedback you get with a wider group again for greater discussion. The remaining words go through a part-of-speech filter and only the nouns, adjectives and verbs are kept. The editor and reviewers' affiliations are the latest provided on their Loop research profiles and may not reflect their situation at the time of review. We present the tool BalancedView, a proof-of-concept that shows news stories relevant to a tweet. Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Kiley, J., and Matsa, K. E. (2014). Confirmation bias can be found in many facets of everyday behavior and can exert great influence in how people process information and make decisions in politics, finance, medicine, personal relationships, and our legal system. 4/15/2021 - Twitter locks out journalist over tweet criticizing marxist BLM founder. I read the Court opinion in this case - I do this a lot 'cause I'm weird like that. This service allows us to query a plethora of sources at the same time and get results from a number of countries in multiple languages. Everyone is susceptible to “confirmation bias”: we find most plausible whatever evidence confirms our own pre-existing opinion. QM: developer, second first author. • Time-limited results: The free version of the NewsAPI only returns results that are less than one month old. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief. Sometimes people will only search for information that agrees with them, defends their beliefs, or affirms their preconceived notions; that is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency for a person to interpret or remember information in a manner that simply confirms their existing beliefs. They may follow only people and news sources who share that belief. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions … A key aspect to discuss is how the sources are selected.