Persistence of Fake News

The other day I was reading about Alex Jones, the awful man who has called Sandy Hook a hoax.  Apparently, Jones has Trump's attention, and family members of victims have decried this relationship.

The rise of fake news is disturbing.  Fake news is not news and it is not new; conspiracy theorists have been around for ages.  I have no idea how we rid the system of this stuff, but Google is not necessarily helping.  In my decision making class, we discuss confirmation bias.  Confirmation bias, broadly speaking, is the tendency to look for evidence that is consistent with (or confirms) some hypothesized belief.  It is also the tendency to weigh confirmatory evidence more favorably than disconfirmatory evidence.

The blog below asks, "Is Google making us less rational?"

Suppose that you wake up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep and hear that we have a President named Barack Obama and that he was born in Kenya.  You might respond two ways: "That's interesting.  I wonder if it is true?"  "That's crazy.  I bet that's not true!"  Those different reactions will lead to different Google queries, e.g., "Obama born in Kenya" or "Obama born in US".  Here's what you get when you do these two queries:

The first link for "Obama born in Kenya" is a Youtube link, "Barack Obama Admits he was born in Kenya Speech."  In contrast, the query "Obama born in US" brings up a very official looking informational box containing birth details, followed by a Wikipedia entry, and a bunch of entries from Huffington Post, WAPO, USA Today, etc.

So, the persistence of Fake News may be due to the silos and echo chambers which divide America.  But Google's algorithm for searches plus confirmation bias may also contribute to the problem.