It Wasn’t Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic
The problem here? A lot of these people think they’re Sherlock Holmes. And none of them are.
Well, the problem is that they’re people, and people are good at finding evidence for things they want to believe. People who are heavily invested in the idea that Twitter and Reddit are superior sources of news information found (or invented) confirmatory evidence of that, and the community of people who have self-assembled around that idea grabbed that information and amplified it.
Confirmation bias is real and measurable, and everyone is prone to it. It’s baked into how our brains have evolved. It’s not just that “a lot of these people” think they’re Sherlock Holmes, and are wrong about that. It’s that everyone thinks they’re Sherlock Holmes, and are wrong about that.
The professional ethics that used to exist in the old-school news media to counter that sort of bias seem to have been eroding at a rapid clip, and maybe the pressure put on them by the spread of information technology to the great unwashed is part of the picture. But it’s not just a few rogue redditors’ Sherlockian delusions that are to blame. It’s all of us.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/48379351222.
