A PR Hoax Created the Year’s Hottest Rock Band. Imagine What It Can Do in Politics
Maybe the best advice is at the end of the article – assume you are being manipulated.
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Worth Reading – Fake news and trust
This is the instruction manual. Make everything seem dangerous and chaotic, then offer simplistic fixes and explanations that aren’t true at all, but fit a narrative you wish to manipulate people with. As Seth describes, the easy thing to do is to accept those explanations and stop thinking about it much further. We are hard-wired to do that. We’ve been educated to do that. We’ve been told simplistic lies like the world is fair, and good things happen to good people, and we believe it because the truth is much less comfortable.
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Worth Reading – How Malinformation Tricks Your Brain
The article above, however, makes it clear that our brains take shortcuts to make quick decisions. In doing so, the number of times we see something that isn’t true can impact whether we treat it as false or true. They say familiarity breeds contempt when it comes to other people, but maybe familiarity with shared information breeds acceptance, regardless of the truth.
That is frightening in a world where tens of thousands of posts can be created in minutes.
