Submitted by asbruckman t3_yu22hj in science
A lot of the comments in here need to read at least the Abstract. Seems many are assuming an order of operations that is backwards from what this study actually did.
This study did not see a story and then go to Snopes to find out if the story was true or not. This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories. As one of the authors have already said in these comments, "the specific stories in the study were not borderline—they were provably wrong."
Honestly not surprised seeing people be so anti-snopes in here. For being a science sub, a large part of the userbase really seem to be very politically motivated to only believe science that confirm their right wing beliefs and are frequently upset with topics that go against primarily conservative ideas.
You see this a lot whenever research confirms progressive ideas, not just in social sciences but more "hard" sciences as well, the userbase bends itself backwards to nitpick the most innane things to try and discredit the research. The way people are discussing snopes in like half the comments here feels like an encapsulation of that.
>For being a science sub, a large part of the userbase really seem to be very politically motivated
You are one of those people, obviously.
[removed]
[removed]
> This study did not see a story and then go to Snopes to find out if the story was true or not. This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories.
That certainly doesn't seem like the best way to describe how the research was conducted, this (directly from the methods) seems much better:
> We used the Reddit API to find accounts who created subreddit posts that contained these links from Snopes fact-check articles
> As one of the authors have already said in these comments, "the specific stories in the study were not borderline—they were provably wrong."
Considering the lack of information provided by the authors of the study regarding what the stories are...it seems quite odd. While some are certainly bs just based of the few words mentioned in the paper, for quite a few of them, that is certainly not the case.
Right there.
>We started with stories marked as false by a popular fact checker, Snopes, and identified people who posted those stories on Reddit.
Which is perfectly in line with your quoted portions.
> This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories. As
So the study went: Snopes -> Sources on Snopes containing misinformation -> Searching Reddit for those stories. That is exactly what I said before.
Instead, you wrote:
> This study started with false stories and then found those who were sharing those false stories
Which makes it seem that it went:
Find false stories -> Search Reddit for false stories
Which completely misses the snopes part.
What? No. It started with Snopes, found ones labeled false, chose ones provably false (according to the researcher's statements elsewhere in this thread), then it searched for people who were sharing the misinformation.
That is exactly what I said.
Oh. "Sources on Snopes containing misinformation" sounded like you were saying Snopes contains misinformation.
What I wrote is exactly what my top comment was trying to say. Find false stories (through Snopes), search Reddit for (people spreading those) false stores (for various reasons, which is what the paper is about... what are the reasons they shared them)
Not at all.
I just think the authors should be sharing more data (including sources) than was released in this paper.
That would be ethically problematic since that information could be used to identify/out participants.
Then that seems like a poor study design by the authors that they cannot release essentially all of the data that they obtained, but that why it is in this journal compared to others.
Spoken as someone with no knowledge of the history of snopes as an organisation. Incredible initial flaw in a study that requires objectively false information
If you think ‘we used a north korean fact checker to determine whether these stories are true or false’ would be a critical issue for you then you can’t use the commercial ‘fact checker’ used by corporate and state interests in the west either
The list of stories they have ’fact checked’ siding with govt (particularly over war crime accusations in the middle east and defending pharmaceutical conglomerates committing criminal activity) only to be exposed as correct after all a few short years down the line makes it completely unsuitable for blindly using it as an omniscient source of objective fact for a study
This is however a good insight into a growing flaw of science in the for-profit medicine age: blindly trusting organisations that directly benefit in misleading the public, either immorally or even criminally, is already swallowing the industry. Find me a scientist who doesn’t think for-profit journals are bad for science, for-profit thinktanks, for-profit pharmaceutical corporations, for-profit charities, for-profit research institutes, research needing to be funded before taking place, corporations writing the textbooks and heading the standard procedures agencies, et cetera. But putting these individual issues all together into a bigger picture of ‘science is fundamentally undermined by the existence of profit’ and everyone prefers cognitive dissonance and to not think about it. Science at some point must escape the shackles of the poison of ‘profit’ and it will only do so when it understands that a corporation saying ‘you can trust us, just don’t look at my bank account or my prior actions’ is not trustworthy actually
> The list of stories they have ’fact checked’ siding with govt (particularly over war crime accusations in the middle east and defending pharmaceutical conglomerates committing criminal activity) only to be exposed as correct after all a few short years down the line makes it completely unsuitable for blindly using it as an omniscient source of objective fact for a study
I haven’t heard these claims before. Do you have suggested reading on this topic?
[removed]
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments