User:FERDA1738/sandbox

What is live on Wikipedia now:

Impact[edit]

Misinformation can affect all aspects of life. Allcott, Gentzkow and Yu (2019:6) concur that diffusion of misinformation through social media is a potential threat to democracy and broader society. The effects of misinformation can lead to the accurateness about information and details of the occurrence to decline. When eavesdropping on conversations, one can gather facts that may not always be true, or the receiver may hear the message incorrectly and spread the information to others. On the Internet, one can read content that is stated to be factual but that may not have been checked or may be erroneous. In the news, companies may emphasize the speed at which they receive and send information but may not always be correct in the facts. These developments contribute to the way misinformation will continue to complicate the public's understanding of issues and to serve as a source for belief and attitude formation.

In regards to politics, some view being a misinformed citizen as worse than being an uninformed citizen. Misinformed citizens can state their beliefs and opinions with confidence and in turn affect elections and policies. This type of misinformation comes from speakers not always being upfront and straightforward, yet may appear both "authoritative and legitimate" on the surface. When information is presented as vague, ambiguous, sarcastic, or partial, receivers are forced to piece the information together and make assumptions about what is correct. Aside from political propaganda, misinformation can also be employed in industrial propaganda. Using tools such as advertising, a company can undermine reliable evidence or influence belief through concerted misinformation campaign. For instance, tobacco companies employed misinformation in the second half of the twentieth century to diminish the reliability of studies that demonstrated the link between smoking and lung cancer. In the medical field, misinformation can immediately lead to life endangerment as seen in the case of the public's negative perception towards vaccines or the use of herbs instead of medicines to treat diseases.

Websites have been created to help people to discern fact from fiction. For example, the site FactCheck.org has a mission to fact check the media, especially politician speeches and stories going viral on the Internet. The site also includes a forum where people can openly ask questions about information they're not sure is true in both the media and the internet. Similar sites give individuals the option to be able to copy and paste misinformation into a search engine and the site will investigate the truthfulness of the inputted data. Famous online resources, such as Facebook and Google, have attempted to add automatic fact checker programs to their sites, and created the option for users to flag information that they think are false on their website. A way that fact checking programs find misinformation involve finding the truth by analyzing the language and syntax of news stories. Another way is that fact checkers can search for existing information on the subject and compare it to the new broadcasts being put online. Other sites such as Wikipedia and Snopes are also widely used resources for verifying information.

Some scholars and activists are pioneering a movement to eliminate the mis/disinformation and information pollution in the digital world. The theory they are developing, "information environmentalism", has become a curriculum in some universities and colleges.

My changes:

Impact[edit]

Misinformation can affect all aspects of life. Allcott, Gentzkow and Yu (2019:6) concur that diffusion of misinformation through social media is a potential threat to democracy and broader society. The effects of misinformation can lead to the accurateness about information and details of the occurrence to decline. When eavesdropping on conversations, one can gather facts that may not always be true, or the receiver may hear the message incorrectly and spread the information to others. On the Internet, one can read content that is stated to be factual but that may not have been checked or may be erroneous. In the news, companies may emphasize the speed at which they receive and send information but may not always be correct in the facts. These developments contribute to the way misinformation will continue to complicate the public's understanding of issues and to serve as a source for belief and attitude formation.

In regards to politics, some view being a misinformed citizen as worse than being an uninformed citizen. Misinformed citizens can state their beliefs and opinions with confidence and in turn affect elections and policies. This type of misinformation comes from speakers not always being upfront and straightforward, yet may appear both "authoritative and legitimate" on the surface. When information is presented as vague, ambiguous, sarcastic, or partial, receivers are forced to piece the information together and make assumptions about what is correct. Aside from political propaganda, misinformation can also be employed in industrial propaganda. Using tools such as advertising, a company can undermine reliable evidence or influence belief through concerted misinformation campaign. For instance, tobacco companies employed misinformation in the second half of the twentieth century to diminish the reliability of studies that demonstrated the link between smoking and lung cancer. In the medical field, misinformation can immediately lead to life endangerment as seen in the case of the public's negative perception towards vaccines or favoring more traditional "at home remedies" over modern medicine.

The COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest example of how dangerous the spread of misinformation is. Misleading information about the virus ran rampant as it began to spread worldwide in March of 2020, and it posed a public health risk like none seen before. Myths and conspiracies about COVID-19 such as its relation to 5G internet towers and how the virus spreads circulating on social media platforms can skew public perception of the virus against information from reliable sources like The World Health Organization (WHO).

Websites have been created to help people to discern fact from fiction. For example, the site FactCheck.org has a mission to fact check the media, especially politician speeches and stories going viral on the Internet. The site also includes a forum where people can openly ask questions about information they're not sure is true in both the media and the internet. Similar sites give individuals the option to be able to copy and paste misinformation into a search engine and the site will investigate the truthfulness of the inputted data. Famous online resources, such as Facebook and Google, have attempted to add automatic fact checker programs to their sites, and created the option for users to flag information that they think are false on their website. A way that fact checking programs find misinformation involve finding the truth by analyzing the language and syntax of news stories. Another way is that fact checkers can search for existing information on the subject and compare it to the new broadcasts being put online. Other sites such as Wikipedia and Snopes are also widely used resources for verifying information.

Some scholars and activists are pioneering a movement to eliminate the mis/disinformation and information pollution in the digital world. The theory they are developing, "information environmentalism", has become a curriculum in some universities and colleges.

pulled from Temple libraries search:

The World Economic forum (WEF) listed the spread of misinformation as one of the main threats to human society because of how persuasive it has become in our social media spaces

pulled from source about Brexit's false bus campaign: