this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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[Misleading] First misinformation susceptibility test finds 'very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news (phys.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Researchers want the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/. Selecting true or false against 20 headlines gives the user a set of scores and a "resilience" ranking that compares them to the wider U.S. population. It takes less than two minutes to complete.

The paper

Edit: the article might be misrepresenting the study and its findings, so it's worth checking the paper itself. (See @realChem 's comment in the thread).

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I assume the idea is to include some pointless headlines (such as this) in order to provide some sort of baseline. The researcher probably extracts several dimensions from the variables, and I assume this headline would feed into a "general scepticism" variable that measures he likelihood that the respondent will lean towards things being fake rather than real.

Still, I'm not at all convinced about this research design.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I suspect that where you select on the extremely liberal to extremely conservative spectrum might have a correlation to which fake news titles you fall for. What sounds like obvious propaganda to you may sound like any news article that some may see from a more sensationalist less reliable news source, especially to those predisposed to conspiracy theories.