#A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

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Unfolding the Bitter Truth: The Dark Side of Media and Technology

The twenty-first century seems to be a challenging time to become media and technologically literate. Inadequate information has the potential to ruin lives, and we all have a responsibility to combat it wherever we see it. The majority of research has focused on the "bright side" of media and technology, with the goal of understanding and assisting in leveraging the numerous possibilities afforded by its use. As the world's primary means of communication is an inseparable combination of media and technology, it also has a dark side. The current global misinformation and "information glut" (Postman, 1995), as well as waves of cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, false information, and privacy violations, demonstrated the need for a new approach to this problem.

Individuals face enormous risks as a result of media and technology

Many forms of social media have effectively monopolized the internet. People are obviously on social media because they believe it improves their lives. But, in fact, does it? Is it true that people are using social media to socialize, or are they surveying other people and their posts to see what is going on? Are they expressing their disdain for politics or government entities in general? (Venting has been shown to exacerbate rather than alleviate anger.) Are people fighting on Facebook or other forms of social media, destroying relationships rather than enhancing them or people's lives?

People can now connect more easily and conveniently through social media. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that social media poses enormous risks to individuals, communities, businesses, and even society as a whole. Cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, false information, and privacy abuse are examples of the "dark side" of media and technology. Nevertheless, the significant negative effects of media and technology must be investigated further.

Too much use of electronic devices and the Internet can have negative consequences for one's health

In general, media consumption can be addictive. As a result, excessive use of electronic devices and the Internet can result in health issues. Constant exposure to loud noises from the use of headphones and earphones can cause hearing loss, and even hours of prolonged use of any technological product in fixed posture can cause musculoskeletal problems (World Health Organization, 2O14).

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that the more time people spend on Facebook, the more depressed they become. When scrolling through the positive aspects of other people's lives, it can also cause feelings of jealousy, resentment, and inadequacy. "Results showed that Facebook usage had a significant negative relationship with self-esteem, in other words, the results indicated that users who spent more time on Facebook have lower self-esteem," according to a study conducted at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

A study published in "Computers in Human Behaviors" in 2014 revealed that the majority of people on social media are not using it to be social. Instead, it was discovered that the majority of people use it to consume information, which researchers discovered leaves them feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied. Another study, published in "Current Opinion in Psychology" in 2016, found that envying other people on social media leads to depression. When people are scrolling through vacation photos of someone's recent trip to Siargao, happy relationship statuses, parties, or people having a good time in general while they are ill, sad, or alone, it only adds to their loneliness and depression.

Online v.s. Reality

Social media platforms enable people to conceal and edit the truth, replacing it with their idealistic version. As a result, social media use can have a negative impact on one's body image as a result of comparison to these 'ideal' standards. This frequently makes young people feel set up for failure because they are constantly comparing themselves to these 'supermodels’ asking themselves questions like, "Why don't I look like her?" “Why is she so lovely?” “Why does her life appear to be so perfect?”. This fosters a severely unhealthy mindset among today's youth, a time when we have normalized wanting to imitate the images and success of others they have seen on social media, and pushing oneself excessively to achieve it.

According to Stanford University, heavy social media use is associated with an increased risk of depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. Negative experiences, such as feelings of weakness in people's lives or appearances, may be elevated by social media. People are dissatisfied because of the negative energy released by social media's false beliefs and demands. The dangers of social media and unrealistic viewpoints are significant because they affect the vast majority of today's society. Our society must stop pretending that these issues do not exist, and start making changes. 

The use of social media significantly increases victims' risk of suicidal behavior

This topic should come as no surprise to anyone, as it has been a contentious issue for quite some time. It is critical that we recognize that bullying and suicidal behavior are becoming increasingly linked, as social media provides an ideal platform for those looking to put others down in order to feel better about themselves. Numerous documentaries have been made about cyberbullying and its negative emotional and physical effects on victims, increasing their suicidal tendencies. Students who have been bullied or cyberbullied are twice as likely to commit suicide. Victims of cyberbullying are frequently young people who are too afraid or unable to speak up about it to their peers, resorting instead to unhealthy coping mechanisms. From its use as a means of information sharing to the influence and consequences it has on emotional health, social media usage has directly and indirectly popularized the act of suicide.

Suicide claims the lives of over 1.5 million people each year. The use of social media is one of the factors influencing this statistic. Social media acts as a mask, concealing all of the poster's insecurities. It depicts a perfect version of someone or something, but only when we remove the mask can we see the truth. What people thought was a fairy tale has a sinister side to it. Indeed, social media has resulted in an increase in suicide risk factors and suicide-related behaviors.

The Rise of False Information

Traditionally, people got their news from reliable sources, such as journalists and media outlets bound by strict ethical standards. However, the internet has enabled a completely new way of publishing, sharing, and consuming information and news with little regulation or editorial oversight. Many people now get their news from social media sites and networks, and it can be difficult to determine whether or not stories are credible. People's information overload and general lack of understanding of how the internet works has also contributed to an increase in false or hoax stories. Social media platforms can play an important role in increasing the reach of these types of stories. This demonstrates how the digital age has negatively affected our generation. There must be a change for this to stop, particularly in our collective use of social media and technology.

It is extremely crucial that we all become aware of the situation and take appropriate action. Continuing to mindlessly scroll through Instagram or other platforms will not help to solve the problem. An increase in parental supervision could be one solution. Increased parental awareness and involvement in their children's lives may make them less vulnerable and impressionable to the media. We must also educate ourselves on the reality of social media – the image displayed for us to see is rarely representative of what is happening behind the screen.

It is important to be mindful of and critical of social media content in order to recognize and support oneself when confronted with the dark side of social media. The solution is not to avoid all forms of media entirely or to embrace every aspect of it heartedly. It must, instead, be thoroughly examined and evaluated.

In conclusion, media and technology can have a negative impact on people. It's a public bulletin board where people can post and read anything. However, in order to fight potential risks and dangers online, it is necessary to embody awareness, responsibility, and discipline. They can play out circumstances, seek advice on how to overcome obstacles, and explain the potential consequences of device abuse and inappropriate behavior.

Sources Cited:

Science Explains How Facebook Makes You Sad | Psychology Today

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-dark-side-of-social-media/

https://www.lifespan.org/lifespan-living/social-media-good-bad-and-ugly

Photos from:

https://www.rawgist.com/the-dark-side-of-technology-this-is-a-serious-issue-for-you-and-your-children/

https://www.artfutura.org/v3/en/humanized_technology/

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[componentplanet]

A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

A delightful mess of Google-colored cables

A new study into sources of misinformation suggests that humans self-generate it on a regular basis by misrecalling information they’ve previously learned in ways that fit already-existing opinions and biases.

The term misinformation is specifically defined as Merriam-Webster as “incorrect or misleading information.” It is distinct from terms like disinformation, which is defined as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” One of the major differences between misinformation and disinformation is motive. Disinformation campaigns are always deliberate, misinformation can be spread in good faith.

The sources of misinformation matter a great deal if your goal is to deepen people’s understandings of facts and improve the quality of public discourse. If you think about how information is distributed, you probably picture some version of a top-down model: Something happens, eyewitnesses and journalists converge on it, and the information they collectively report filters down to all of us through whatever media we use to consume it. The education system uses more-or-less the same model.

Typically, when people think about fighting misinformation, we think about it in terms of fact-checking sources and ensuring the data in an article or textbook is as complete and up-to-date as possible. I check facts like die sizes, launch dates, and benchmark results on a regular basis to make certain that I’m writing factual data.

A new paper published in Human Communication Research suggests, however, that we’ve been overlooking a significant source of misinformation — and it’s going to be far more difficult to fix: Humans appear to self-generate misinformation even when they’ve been given the facts. This study focused on numerical misinformation — i.e., mistransmission of data related to specific factual information that study participants had been given. The fundamental goal of the experiment was to measure whether or not humans would remember numbers better if the claims they were given were consistent or inconsistent with the beliefs of the individual.

To test this, individuals were presented with data on topics like support for same-sex marriage in the US, gender preferences for one’s boss, the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and the total number of white people killed by police in 2016 versus the total number of black people. The individuals being tested were polled for their own pre-test expectations on these topics and the data presented to them was given in a manner that was both consistent with what individuals believed would be true or was chosen to present facts they were less likely to believe are true. Table 1, shown below, shows the framing for the experiment:

Individual polling of the test group showed that the poll results aligned with expectations, which is why this is called “schema consistent.” In the case of Mexican immigrants, people expected there to be more immigrants in 2014 than in 2007, when in fact the opposite was true. The first group of participants were asked to answer questions based on the data they had just seen. Their answers were then used to inform the questions that were shown to a second group of people. The answers from that group were used to inform the questions asked to a third group of people.

The image above shows how the system worked. The test was administered using numerical sliders to give answers and using text input. Effectively, this replicates a game of telephone — each person is transmitting the version of data they remember. Before you look at the next slide, let’s quickly review: Americans generally expect there were more Mexican immigrants in the US in 2014 than in 2007, they believe police killed more black people than white people in 2016, they prefer a male boss to a female boss, and they favor support for same-sex marriage. Now, look at what the test results showed. The values on the far left of the graph are the actual statistics, in every case. Wave 1 indicates the answers of the first group, Wave 2 the second group, etc.

When presented with data that conflicted with their own previously held beliefs, humans get really bad at math. The drop in Mexican immigrants that occurred from 2007 – 2014 reverses in Wave 1. The very first people who saw the data literally couldn’t remember the answer correctly and flipped the values, associating 2007 with fewer immigrants and 2014 with more. Importantly, these results continue to diverge when transmitted to Wave 3. In other words, it’s not just that people think that the overall Mexican immigrant population must have risen because of the passage of time. Wave 1 overestimated the number of Mexican immigrants by 900,000. Wave 3 overestimated it by 4.1 million. In this case, the initial figure of total immigrants doesn’t drop all that much and most of the inaccuracy is introduced by grossly inflated estimates of how many Mexicans moved to the US over this period.

With police shootings, Wave 1 manages to remember that more whites than blacks were shot, even if both values are wrong. Starting with Wave 2, we get the same crossover that we saw with Wave 1 — except in this case, the initial value keeps being shoved lower.

The data on police shootings shows a little more staying power. While the absolute values both moved towards reversing, Wave 1 still remembered which group was larger. By Wave 2 — remember, that’s the group that used the answers Wave 1 gave — that effect has completely reversed. This time, however, both numbers have come unmoored from their original data points in both tests.

But if you give people data they do expect, they show completely different mental patterns — not so much necessarily in terms of absolute accuracy, but at least in terms of relationships. In the case of percentage of Americans who prefer a male versus a female boss, the percentages climb towards the group-reported estimate of belief rather than maintaining the initial levels given, even though the initial percentages show clear preference for male over female bosses (aligning with general group preference). In the last case, the number of Americans who favored same-sex marriage was underestimated, while the percentage opposed declined in Wave 1 and then moved back towards the actual value.

Participants in the NIH ResearchMatch version of the study were told that numerical percentages could not exceed 100 percent in the slider version, and also told that the total number of immigrants did not exceed 20 million, which may explain some of the differences, but the charts are in general agreement.

People Remember Facts Less Well if They Disagree With Them

There are two interesting findings here. First, there’s further evidence that people literally remember facts less-well if they don’t agree with them. For all the people who claim they change their mind if confronted with facts, the reality is that people tend to change their facts, not their opinions — even when asked to answer questions about information they literally just read.

This has serious implications for how we think, as a society, about the transmission of information from one mind to another. About a year ago, I wrote a story debunking some rumors about AMD’s then-future 7nm Ryzen CPUs. At the time, some individuals were arguing that AMD’s 7nm CPUs would simultaneously deliver huge price cuts, more cores, large clock speed increases, and a giant leap in IPC, simultaneously. My debunk article wasn’t 100 percent accurate — I guessed that AMD might not use chiplets for desktop Ryzen and reserve them for Epyc instead — but the final chips AMD launched bear absolutely no resemblance to the rumored configurations.

I addressed this topic several times over six months because this set of rumors simply would not die. I bolstered my arguments with historical CPU data, long-term CPU clock scaling trends, AMD’s statements to investors, AMD’s statements to the press, and long-term comparisons on the relationship between AMD’s margins and its net profits. I discussed increasing wafer costs and how chiplets, while a great innovation, were also a symptom of the problems AMD was facing.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not arguing that everyone who read those stories was somehow automatically obligated to agree with me. My prognostication record is anything but perfect and reasonable people can disagree on how they read broad industry trends. There’s a difference, however, between “I think 7nm clocks might come in a little higher than you do,” and “I think AMD will simultaneously slash prices, slash power consumption, and revolutionize semiconductors with generational performance gains we haven’t seen in almost a decade,” despite the fact that there was literally no evidence to support any of these positions.

If you showed up to argue the former, or something that even reasonably looks like it, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about the vocal minority of people who showed up to argue that AMD was about to launch the Second Coming in silicon form. Those who didn’t predict my firing often suggested I’d be writing a tearful apology at some later date.

My point in bringing this up isn’t to rehash old arguments or toot my horn. My point is that there’s a real life example of this very phenomena that you can go and read about. I don’t know where these rumors started, but once they took hold, they proved quite tenacious. As good as Ryzen is — and 7nm Ryzen is great — the rumors about it were better than the CPU could ever possibly be. When confronted with this, some people got angry.

Short of giving the planet some in-depth training in overcoming cognitive bias, it’s not clear how to reduce the spread of person-to-person misinformation, and the authors conclude that more study is needed here. As important as it is to ensure the factual accuracy of primary sources, the fact that humans appear to generate misinformation in an effort to make that data align with pre-existing schemas means focusing solely on the primary source problem will never address its full scope.

Now Read:

Technology Enables ‘Fake News.’ Can It Help Stop It, Too?

YouTube, Like Facebook, Ignored Toxicity Warnings in Favor of ‘Engagement’

No One Wants to Talk About How Completely We Were Lied to

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/303881-a-new-study-indicates-humans-self-generate-misinformation from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-new-study-indicates-humans-self.html

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[stephenmccull]

It’s Time to Get Back to Normal? Not According to Science.

The science says “open the schools, stop wearing masks outside, and everyone at low risk should start living normal lives.”

— Blog post by conservative talk show host Buck Sexton posted on Facebook, Feb. 8.

This story was produced in partnership with PolitiFact.  It can be republished for free.

A popular Facebook and blog post by conservative radio host Buck Sexton claims scientific research indicates life should return to normal now despite the persistence of the covid-19 pandemic.

“Here’s what the science tells anyone who is being honest about it: open the schools, stop wearing masks outside, and everyone at low risk should start living normal lives. Not next fall, or next year — now,” reads the blog post, posted to Facebook on Feb. 8.

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with Facebook.)

KHN-PolitiFact messaged Sexton via his Facebook page to ask if he could provide evidence to back up the statement but got no response.

So we reviewed the scientific evidence and talked to public health experts about Sexton’s post. Overall, they disagreed, noting the ways in which it runs counter to current public health strategies.

Let’s take it point by point.

‘Opening the Schools‘

In March, when government and public health leaders realized the novel coronavirus was spreading throughout the U.S., many public institutions — including schools — were ordered to shut down to prevent further spread. Many students finished the 2020 spring semester remotely. Some jurisdictions did choose to reopen schools in fall 2020 and spring 2021, though others have remained remote.

Throughout the pandemic, researchers have studied whether in-person learning at schools contributes significantly to the spread of covid. The findings have shown that if K-12 schools adhere to mitigation measures — masking, physical distancing and frequent hand-washing — are adhered to, then there is a relatively low risk of transmission.

And getting kids back into the classroom is a high priority for the Biden administration.

n a Feb. 3 White House press briefing, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said data suggests “schools can safely reopen.” The CDC on Feb. 12 released guidance on how schools should approach reopening. It recommends the standard risk-mitigation measures, as well as universal masking, contact tracing, creating student learning cohorts or pods, conducting testing and monitoring community transmission of the virus.

Susan Hassig, associate professor of epidemiology at Tulane University, said science shows that schools can open safely if “mitigation measures are implemented and maintained in the school space.”

Here’s some of the latest research that tracks with these positions:

Only seven covid cases out of 191 were traced to in-school spread in 17 rural K-12 Wisconsin schools that had high mask-wearing compliance and were monitored over the 2020 fall semester.

Mississippi researchers found most covid cases in children and teenagers were associated with gatherings outside of households and a lack of consistent mask use in schools, but not associated with merely attending school or child care.

Thirty-two cases were associated with attending school out of 100,000 students and staff members in 11 North Carolina schools, where students were required to wear masks, practice physical distancing and wash hands frequently.

Of course, there are some limitations to these studies, which often rely on contact tracing, a process that can’t always pinpoint where cases originate. Some of the studies also rely on self-reporting of mask-wearing by individuals, which could be inaccurate.

Additionally, Hassig pointed out that not all school districts have the resources, such as physical space, personnel or high-quality masks, to open safely.

Sexton’s assertion that schools can reopen leaves out a key piece of information: that safe reopening is highly dependent upon use of mitigation measures that have been shown to tamp down on virus spread.

‘Stop Wearing Masks Outside’

Because the coronavirus that causes covid is relatively new, the research on outdoor mask use is limited. But so far science has shown that masks prevent virus transmission.

The CDC study published Feb. 10 reported that a medical procedure mask (commonly known as a surgical mask) blocked 56.1% of simulated cough particles. A cloth mask blocked 51.4% of cough particles. And the effectiveness went up to 85.4% if a cloth mask was worn over a surgical mask.

Another experiment from the study showed that a person in a mask emits fewer aerosol particles that can be passed on to an unmasked person. And if both are masked, then aerosol exposure to both is reduced by more than 95%. A multitude of reports also show more generally that mask-wearing is effective at reducing the risk of spreading or catching other respiratory diseases.

Sexton’s post, however, advised that people should stop wearing masks outside. To be sure, public health experts agree the risk of transmitting covid is lower outdoors than indoors. But the experts also said that doesn’t mean people should stop wearing masks.

“The wind might help you a bit outside, but you are still at risk of breathing in this virus from people around you,” said Dr. Rachel Vreeman, director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Being outside is “not a guarantee of safety,” reiterated Stephen Morse, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University Medical Center. “Especially when those people without masks are close together.”

The CDC addressed the issue of whether masks are needed outside in the agency’s mask guidelines: “Masks may not be necessary when you are outside by yourself away from others, or with other people who live in your household. However, some areas may have mask mandates while out in public, so please check for the rules in your local area.”

Overall, the prevailing scientific opinion is that, while it may be OK to go maskless outside if you are physically distant from others, ask-wearing is still recommended if you are around others.

‘Everyone at Low Risk Should Start Living Normal Lives’

All the public health experts we consulted agreed this part of the claim is absolutely false. It flies in the face of what scientists recommend should be done to get through the pandemic.

While it’s unclear what exactly the post means by “low-risk” people, let’s assume it’s referring to younger people or those without health conditions that make them more vulnerable to covid. And that “living normal lives” refers to no longer wearing masks, physical distancing or washing hands with increased frequency.

News reports and scientific evidence show that bars, parties and other large gatherings can quickly become spreader events. Moreover, even young people and those without preexisting health conditions have gotten severely ill with covid or died of it.

Even if a low-risk person doesn’t get severely sick, they could still infect others in higher-risk groups.

The sentiment of this post is similar to calls early in the pandemic to let life return to normal in an attempt to achieve herd immunity. But, on the way to achieving that goal, many would die, said Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at KFF.

“Everyone going back to ‘normal’ right now, especially in the presence of more transmissible and more deadly variants, would be a recipe for further public health disasters on top of what we’ve already experienced,” he added.

Already almost half a million Americans have died of covid.

The push to “return to normal” is precisely what let the new variants form and multiply, said Vreeman. “If we can ramp up getting people vaccinated and keep wearing masks in the meantime, only then will we have a chance at getting back to ‘normal.’”

Indeed, because of the new variants circulating in the U.S., Walensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have urged Americans not to relax their efforts to control the virus’s spread.

Our Ruling

A blog post by conservative talk show host Buck Sexton claims scientific evidence shows that right now we should “open the schools, stop wearing masks outside, and everyone at low risk should start living normal lives.”

Scientific research shows that in order for schools to reopen safely, risk mitigation measures must be put in place, such as requiring masks, rigorous hand-washing and limiting the number of students in classrooms. These changes, though, would not represent a return to normal, but a new normal for students and teachers.

The remainder of Sexton’s statement strays further from current science. Research indicates that you’re safer outdoors than indoors, but public health experts still recommend wearing masks in public, even outside. Science does not support the idea that the time is right for some people to resume life as normal. That would allow the virus to continue to spread and have a large human cost in hospitalizations and deaths, said the experts.

Sexton’s post is inaccurate. We rate it False.

Source List:

ABC News, “’Wrecked Our Lives’: Families of 3 Young Adults Who Died From COVID-19 Share Heartbreaking Stories,” Nov. 19, 2020

American Association of Pediatrics News, Study: In-School Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Rare in Schools Implementing Safety Measures, Jan. 8, 2021

Buck Sexton website, “Get Ready to Fight ‘Forever Covid,’” Feb. 8, 2021

BMJ Global Health, Reduction of Secondary Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Households by Face Mask Use, Disinfection and Social Distancing: A Cohort Study in Beijing, China, 2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Mitigation, Feb. 12, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Guidance for Wearing Masks, updated Feb. 11, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Maximizing Fit for Cloth and Medical Procedure Masks to Improve Performance and Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Transmission and Exposure, 2021, Feb. 10, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Associated With High School Wrestling Tournaments — Florida, December 2020-January 2021, Jan. 29, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Cases and Transmission in 17 K-12 Schools — Wood County, Wisconsin, August 31-November 29, 2020, Jan. 29, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trends in Outbreak-Associated Cases of COVID-19 — Wisconsin, March-November 2020, Jan. 29, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Factors Associated With Positive SARS-CoV-2 Test Results in Outpatient Health Facilities and Emergency Departments Among Children and Adolescents Aged <18 Years — Mississippi, September-November 2020, Dec. 18, 2020

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Scientific Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2, Nov. 20, 2020

Chalkbeat, “Do Schools Spread COVID? It May Depend on How Bad Things Already Are Around Them,” Jan. 4, 2021

The Conversation, “Being Outdoors Doesn’t Mean You’re Safe From COVID-19 — A White House Event Showed What Not to Do,” Oct. 8, 2020

Email interview with Susan Hassig, associate professor of epidemiology at Tulane University, Feb. 10, 2021

Email interview with Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at Kaiser Family Foundation, Feb. 10, 2021

Email interview with Dr. Rachel Vreeman, director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, Feb. 10, 2021

Email interview with Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center, Feb. 10, 2021

Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, Coronavirus and COVID-19: Younger Adults Are at Risk, Too, updated Dec. 2, 2020

Kaiser Health News/PolitiFact, “Social Media Image About Mask Efficacy Right in Sentiment, but Percentages Are ‘Bonkers,’” July 6, 2020

medRxiv, Closed Environments Facilitate Secondary Transmission of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), April 16, 2020

Pediatrics, Incidence and Secondary Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Schools, January 2021

PNAS, An Evidence Review of Face Masks Against COVID-19, Jan. 26, 2021

The New York Times, “How Safe Are Outdoor Gatherings?” July 3, 2020

The Washington Post, “CDC Finds Scant Spread of Coronavirus in Schools With Precautions in Place,” Jan. 26, 2021

The White House, Press Briefing by White House COVID-19 Response Team and Public Health Officials, Feb. 3, 2021

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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It’s Time to Get Back to Normal? Not According to Science. published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

January 10, 2021

This is my weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include commentary on this week’s events, birth rates in South Korea, clean water, human rights, and new local leaders.

Violence at the Capitol

As you surely know, this week a group of far-right activists descended on the Capitol building. Many engaged in peaceful protest, as is their right, but many invaded and vandalized the buildings. Some people brought zip ties, guns, and other weapons with the obvious intention of doing more damage. Six people lost their lives. As horrific as this was, we are fortunate that the situation was not even worse.

People place far too much of their identity in politics. Parties are OK for what they do, but they should not be the basis for self-worth. Certainly if people disrespect the Libertarian Party, as happens frequently, or if Libertarians don’t get elected, as happens seldom, I am not going to lose sleep or feel that I have been personally damaged. I faced real challenges in the past year, and it was family and friends, not political ideologies, who were there for me.

For people who believe in individual rights and freedom, though, I do think there is a need to be vocal. This means rejecting the evil ideologies that infest the far left--socialism and ecologism--and the far right--fascism and theocracy. What these ideologies have in common is collectivism, which is the belief the group, however defined, is more important than the individual and subsumes individual identity. There is also a need to devolve power: from the White House to the departments, from the Executive Branch to Congress, from the federal government to other levels, and from government in general to civil society. This way we can go about politics as the ordinary tussle for power, and not the existential threat as it is frequently viewed.

There is a need to restore norms. This means cracking down on hate speech, conspiracy theories, and threats of violence in the public sphere. This also means fair and well-equipped law enforcement. I fear that the toleration for lawlessness and rioting that has occurred in some cities, in the face of BLM and anti-police brutality protests, have created a norm that rioting in an acceptable means of political activism, one that has now been exploited by other groups. It should be noted too that this week’s events are hardly the first incident of right wing violence; in the past year there has been incidents at numerous state houses and a major terrorist plot that was foiled in Michigan. I fear there will be more; indeed, Twitter has revealed efforts to engage in more violence in DC on January 17 and 20.

Conspiracism is a widespread phenomenon, and much has been said about the repeatedly discredited notions of election fraud, and sadly this is not new. One should place recent claims in the context of similar claims about election fraud in 2016, alleged chicanery from the Russians, conspiracy theories about ACORN and the Obama birth certificate, or supposed misdeeds by the Supreme Court in 2000. In a press conference on Thursday, announcing several appointments to the Department of Justice, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made the claim that police cracked down on BLM protesters while treating this week’s insurrectionists with kid gloves. Maybe these claims are true, but I don’t see evidence other than a few out-of-context images on social media. There is a need to call out misinformation, especially if it comes from what one perceives to be one’s own tribe. People can die from the spread of bad information.

South Korea’s Birth Rates

Most countries in the world are experiencing declining birth rates, and most of the wealthy countries have fallen into sub-replacement territory, meaning that birth rates are not sufficient to maintain a population in the long run. But no country has fallen as catastrophically as South Korea, with fertility standing at 0.84. A rate slightly above 2.0 is the replacement rate. South Korea is getting into Children of Men territory.

The government has responded with an about $1800 USD baby bonus, a good move but one that is wholly inadequate. Having looked at the issue more extensively last year, I can’t really say what would work, only offer a laundry list of ideas that will hopefully help.

Over most of the wealthy world, we have created conditions, both social and financial, that are hostile to young families. The long term damage from these conditions will be catastrophic. The only upside I see now is that more governments are taking notice, and people within environmental movements and NGOs who advocate “population control” are being rightfully marginalized.

Clean Water

Believe it or not, I did some actual work this week too. There is a Clean Water and Sanitation section up on Urban Cruise Ship, sans graphics. The material here is pretty basic and will not be a surprise to anyone who follows international development. Water access, defined both by access to an improved water source and access to a clean water supply, have both improved, but in some parts of the world improvement has been frustratingly slow.

I cited a study that it will cost $1.04 trillion annually to provide universal clean water and sanitation, a figure that’s higher than I thought but still seems affordable. It should be understood, though, that poor governance and infrastructure is much more a barrier to clean water access than raw dollars. I also cited a few cost-benefit studies which show better-than-unity return for water projects in general, though there are parts of the world where costs exceed benefits.

I also put together a section on Industrial Crops, but I’m not happy with it now. Lacking good ideas on how to improve it, I’m moving on and will come back later.

Human Rights

Yesterday I started work on the section on Social Well-Being (nothing yet uploaded to the site), with an emphasis on several aspects of human rights. A person might ask what this is doing on an environmental site. To be relevant, environmentalists have to speak directly to human needs, and few things are more important to human needs than human rights.

Freedom House has maintained an annual report since 1972 outlining the state of freedom in the world. The reports show a general improvement in world democratization until around 2007, and a deterioration since then. The latest report shows data in 2019; it appears that the 2020 data will show further deterioration.

It should be noted that Freedom House is funded in large part from the US government, and people have questioned their methodology. Other indices of human rights, such as The Polity Project and the Democracy Index differ in many on the specifics but show the same general world trend.

The case for democracy has to be made; it can’t merely be assumed. I’ve cited a few studies showing how democracy is correlated with other measures of well-being, but the correlations are not cut-and-dry, and neither is the definition of “democracy”. For example, within the democratization framework, there is considerable debate about the importance of minority rights, the protection of which may mean restraining the popular will.

This could be a long section, but it is an important one.

New Local Leaders

Since this is January, new leaders were inaugurated around the Portland area, as were in DC, and several old leaders were re-inaugurated. In Hillsboro, the new council member Gina Roletto has replaced Fred Nachtigal, who was term-limited out. Nafisa Fai was inaugurated at the Washington County Board of Commissioners. At Oregon Metro, Mary Nolan and Gerritt Rosenthal have joined the Council. The latter I know from previous activities in the local Democratic Party.

I am looking forward to seeing how the new leaders do. Putting aside differences in political philosophy, they seem like well-meaning people who will try to do their jobs well.

[day0one]

They thought COVID-19 was a hoax until they fell ill “The mindset that people have is that it’s not real until it gets close to home."

Ruben Mata, a fitness trainer in Stanton, California, who has traveled the world as a motivational speaker, was adamant in the early days of the epidemic that the coronavirus was not real. Most of what he had heard about the virus he’d gleaned from his friends at the gym he attended religiously, even as the pandemic raged across the U.S. But just a couple of weeks after the Trump administration declared a national emergency on March 13, Mata, 53, was diagnosed with COVID-19. He subsequently spent five days in a medically induced coma; at one point he was given less than a 40 percent chance of survival. Now he wants others to learn from his missteps.

“Before I contracted it I thought, ‘It’s just made up, it’s all fabricated’,” Mata told NBC News “Global Hangout” this week, adding that he figured his six-day-a-week gym habit and healthy eating regimen would spare him even if it did exist. “That’s what prevented me from getting help sooner, when it went really bad.”

Mata is not alone.

Eight months into a global pandemic that has infected more than 18 million people and killed more than 700,000 people worldwide, there are still those who are deeply skeptical about the dangers the virus poses. Others simply don’t believe it exists at all. One recent Pew Research Center poll found that, between late April and early June, the proportion of Americans who said the coronavirus pandemic had been exaggerated had increased from 3 in 10 to nearly 4 in 10. An earlier poll conducted by Survey 160 and Gradient Metrics indicated that Fox News watchers were more likely to believe that the threat of the virus had been overblown. And in recent weeks, there have been reports of Americans on their deathbeds confessing they thought the virus was a hoax.

It all underscores the enormous information battle that’s running concurrently with the war againstCOVID-19. Though the news is filled with stories of death, lockdown and quarantines, President Donald Trump continues to paint a rosy outlook about the nation’s handling of the virus and to downplay its severity. This week, Facebook and Twitter removed videos posted by the Trump campaign’s social media accounts that the two companies said contained misinformation about the coronavirus. The offending video included a clip from Fox News on which the president erroneously claimed that children were “almost immune” to the virus. Coronavirus, like the debate about vaccines, has become political.

That polarization is exacerbated by another issue: where Americans get their information. An analysis conducted from October 2019 to June by the Pew Research Center found that 55 percent of adults in the U.S. “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. That reliance on social media has been a concern for years.

With COVID-19, public health experts trying to keep Americans informed say social media simply cannot be one’s sole source of information.

“You must look beyond your social bubble to get better information and verification,” said Lindsey Leininger, a public health educator and researcher at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire. “Our brains are bad at decision-making under uncertainty. So the way we can best protect ourselves is to trust our social networks, but verify with news sources.”

In June, long after the virus' hold on most of the U.S. had been widely reported, Tony Green, 43, held a small family gathering at his home in Dallas. He had been getting frustrated by state and federal government guidance about social distancing. “It’s family. You know we haven't seen each other in a few months, and to think that you can’t embrace each other, hug my mum? Give me a break. Of course I’m going to hug her,” Green said.

Green, a self-identified gay conservative, quickly regretted the get-together. Just days later, 14 members of his family had fallen ill with the coronavirus. His partner’s grandmother died. Green himself was hospitalized, his central nervous system attacked by the virus, his bed in the ICU just one floor below his father-in-law, Rafael Ceja. Ceja remains on life support, almost two months after the gathering.

“I really want to put some of the blame on the federal government and President Trump, who I actually voted for back in 2016,” Green said. “I think that he has really failed to lead in this area because he’s not really not practicing the social distancing and the mask, and he’s downplaying the severity of it. I mean, I'm sitting here and I'm listening to my leader.”

Green said that until the family gathering, he had gotten most of his information about the virus online, via a large network of friends from around the country whom he describes as “keyboard warriors,” “armchair doctors” and “conspiracy theorists.”

“The bubble I was in online made me think it didn’t add up,” he said. “To think that I went down that rabbit hole, it’s embarrassing.”

But distrust of the virus transcends the geographical, and professional divide; even people in the medical community have underestimated the virus and its impact. A Gallup/Knight Foundation poll of more than 20,000 adults published this week shows how deeply entrenched American distrust of the news media is. A majority of Americans currently see “a great deal” (49 percent) or “a fair amount” (37 percent) of political bias in news coverage, according to the study, and more Americans see bias in news reporting that claims to be objective, with three-quarters calling it “a major problem” (73 percent), compared to 65 percent three years ago.

This media distrust, combined with national leaders playing down the virus’ seriousness, is arguably resulting in more confusion among Americans, and more American deaths.

David Vega, 27, now in medical residency in Miami says he thought he was “invincible” before he caught the virus in March, when he was still a medical student. In his case it wasn't a question of believing the virus was real — he knew it was. But he also believed his youth and general health would protect him from the worst possible outcomes.

After all, that was the messaging everyone repeated: The most vulnerable were the elderly and the immune compromised. Not a robust 20-something. Yet even as stark warnings began to appear in and outside medical communities around the world, with news reports in late February on the closure of schools, universities and public events in Italy, Vega continued to socialize and attend parties — until he fell ill.

“It’s the sickest I’ve ever been,” he said, adding that he lost 10 pounds.

For people like Vega, admitting that they had underestimated the severity of the virus can be a humbling, uncomfortable and frequently embarrassing experience.

"My response to people thinking I might have known better: I'm still a person, I'm still a human being," said Vega, who now works on a COVID-19 ward. In March he wrote about both his pre-COVID bravado and the painful experience that followed for his medical school, the University of Indiana, to try to educate others who may still think the way he did.

Mata, the California-based trainer, is also trying to use his conversion from coronavirus skeptic to realist to change the hearts and minds of those who still underestimate the virus. He’s been speaking out on social media forums and says the responses to his story have been positive. People around the world have reached out to him to thank him for coming forward.

“The mindset that people have is that it’s not real until it gets close to home,” says Mata, who sees his experience as offering credibility to the virus’ virility. “Till it hits a family member, then it’s real.”

Not all skeptics turned evangelists have received such positive feedback.

Green, who hosted the family gathering, wrote an op-ed in July in the LGBTQ newspaper the Dallas Voice. Since then, he has received considerable backlash online. “I was called everything from ‘negligent’ to a ‘murderer.’ I was told I should commit suicide,” Green said. “There were some really hateful, nasty responses.” Indeed the comments to his piece are unprintable here.

In his own social circles, Green says conservatives he knows have been surprised about how passionate he’s now become about talking about the dangers of COVID-19, despite having heard his personal story. Some have questioned his motives, accusing him of aligning himself with liberals on the issue.

Still, for Green, it’s important to get the truth out about the virus, even if it comes at a personal cost: “I’m not about to lie about what I’ve been through.”

[ladystylestores]

In the UK, social media use associated with COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Enlarge / A hat made of the finest tinfoil (in this case worn in jest and probably actually aluminum).

Covid-19 Coverage

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The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted society with a profusion of cases where critical pieces of information simply aren’t known yet. And the public has had to deal with managing a huge number of situations where the risks were outside its control. Under those circumstances, we shouldn’t be surprised that the human belief formation system has stepped into these gaps by latching on to conspiracy theories and substituting nefarious actors for the unknowns and uncontrolled. That’s set off an ongoing battle, pitting unsubstantiated beliefs against public health experts and scientists, as well as the press that conveys their understanding to the public.

So who’s winning? Some academics decided to poll the UK public to find out. The results are a mix of good news and bad news. No conspiracy theory has reached the point where a third of the public believes it yet. But belief is more likely among younger people, who rely on social media for more of their information.

Public opinion

The poll, done by a team at King’s College London, relied on three surveys of the UK public. The first was a relatively small sample of self-selected respondents. But that was followed by two larger surveys (over 2,000 individuals each) that were arranged to accurately reflect the UK’s demographics. Those surveyed were asked questions about whether certain statements about the pandemic were true, as well as about their own behavior in terms of obeying the country’s social restrictions. They were also asked where they got their information about SARS-CoV-2.

(If you prefer to look at the data in graphic form, check out some of the charts the researchers generated using the survey responses.)

Some of the statements involved in the true-or-false scoring are well-known conspiracy theories, like the evidence-free suggestion that the coronavirus had been created in a laboratory, which goes against the evidence of the virus’ evolution. Others were related to topics that are the subject of other widely circulated conspiracy theories, like “The current pandemic is part of a global effort to force everyone to be vaccinated whether they want to or not.” Finally, some are just bizarre, like the suggestion that “There is no hard evidence that coronavirus really exists.”

On the plus side, only 7 percent of those surveyed think that we lack evidence of the virus’ existence. The belief that 5G networks are involved clocks in at 8 percent believing it. Things only creep up slightly when the vaccine conspiracy was considered.

On the less-good side, nearly a third of the UK populace believes in a number of blatant conspiracy theories, like the government hiding the number of people who have died or that the virus was created in a lab. Health authorities clearly have work to do.

Correlations

So, what can we say about the people who believe this stuff? The researchers tested a variety of correlations. One that came out consistently is that the people who were prone to conspiratorial thinking tended to be younger and spend more time using social media when they were looking for information on the pandemic. The most frequently visited site among this group? YouTube, followed closely by Facebook. Getting information from friends and family wasn’t great, but its association with conspiracy belief was weaker than that of social media.

Social media use for research also seemed to be most closely related with the dumber of the conspiracy theories, like questioning whether we know the virus really exists or blaming its spread on 5G cellular networks.

Using social media for pandemic information was more common among younger participants; older people tended to rely more on mainstream media. This is significant in the UK, which has a formal process with potential penalties for TV and print publications that broadcast or publish misinformation. This does not apply to social media companies.

Unfortunately, people appear to be acting on their beliefs. Those who believe in conspiracy theories—particularly the idea that the virus might not exist or that its symptoms are caused by cellular signals—said they were more likely to engage in higher-risk behaviors. These behaviors include having friends or family visit them in their homes or going outside or to work despite having symptoms that could potentially indicate COVID-19. These results are consistent with a variety of past studies that found that people who believe medical conspiracies are less likely to engage in what the researchers term “health protective behaviors.”

Digital media literacy

So what can we do about this? Some seemingly positive news popped up in a study published on Monday by PNAS, entitled, “A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India.” The intervention itself was simple and inexpensive: get people to read Facebook’s “Tips to Spot False News” page. Unfortunately, the effect was pretty small in the best cases—dropping the rate of fake headlines being rated as accurate from 32 to 24 percent, for example—and it varied between experiments.

So, there’s not an obvious silver bullet that will help a lot more people recognize when they stumble across misinformation online. Reality is, for the time being, in an ongoing struggle against the Internet.

Psychological Medicine, 2020. DOI: 10.1017/S003329172000224X  (About DOIs).

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[warninggraphiccontent]

13 March 2020

Viral content

There's a definite theme to a lot of the links this week, unsurprisingly. I've also been keeping track of various useful pieces of advice from people used to remote working as coronavirus fundamentally changes how we work and live, whether in the short term or more profoundly - more on that next week.

But for now, here's an extremely useful tech handbook started by the team at Newspeak House, which has resources on everything from health advice and data about the disease, to advice on working remotely and tackling misinformation.

In other news:

We're doing a very quick project for Nesta on missing data in preventive services - looking specifically at children's centres and youth services. Here's the write-up of a workshop we did - thoughts very welcome.

My colleague Nick celebrated three years at the IfG with a terrible chart. Hilarity ensued.

I was very sad to see that Clare Moriarty, one of the most inspirational senior civil servants to those of us working around data and openness in government, is leaving the civil service. This speech of hers from last year is well worth a read.

I'd forgotten just how good the FT's 404 page is.

Delighted to hear the good people at Citizens Advice are finding inspiration in our dataviz. You may be less delighted by the puns that followed.

And a reminder that we're hiring someone to run Whitehall Monitor. A big thank you to Jukesie for including it in his indispensable jobs newsletter.

Have a good weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Graphic content

Viral chart

A very short thread on the power of data graphics and scientific communication (Carl T. Bergstrom)

Spot the difference... (Rosamund Pearce)

Everyone's job is to help FLATTEN THE CURVE (Dr Siouxsie Wiles)

Coronavirus: How peak of cases could be cut by 'social distancing' (Sky News)

How canceled events and self-quarantines save lives, in one chart (Vox)

It’s not exponential: An economist’s view of the epidemiological curve (voxeu.org)

Viral content

17 responsible live visualizations about the coronavirus, for you to use (Datawrapper)

Illustrative simulations of a transmission model of COVID-19 (The Lancet)

COMMUNICATION THEMES FROM CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK (Visualising Data)

COVID-19: Research in Uncertain Times (Ipsos MORI)

In America, even pandemics are political* (The Economist)

Foot traffic has fallen sharply in cities with big coronavirus outbreaks* (The Economist)

Die Schweiz liegt auf Platz 6 der am stärksten betroffenen Länder – alles zum Coronavirus in 14 Grafiken (NZZ)

9 charts that explain the coronavirus pandemic (Vox)

Right or wrong, there’s no doubt the UK is increasingly an outlier in our Covid response (BBC Newsnight)

Soap is such an ordinary thing. Can it really kill a virus? (YES! Now wash your hands) (Prof Lucy Rogers)

From coronavirus to bushfires, misleading maps are distorting reality (First Draft news, via in other news)

Coronavirus: UK maps and charts (BBC News)

How Coronavirus Hijacks Your Cells* (New York Times)

How Deadly Is Coronavirus? What We Know and What We Don’t* (The Upshot)

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) (Our World in Data)

Total UK cases COVID-19 Cases Update (Public Health England)

Coronavirus Data Pack (Information is Beautiful)

Wie das Coronavirus nach Deutschland kam (Zeit Online)

COVID-19 MAP (/r/CovidMapping, via Pritesh)

How the World’s Largest Coronavirus Outbreaks Are Growing* (New York Times)

Exponential growth and epidemics (3Blue1Brown)

I’m no epidemiologist, but I am a #dataviz specialist, so here are some thoughts on coronavirus and log scales (John Burn-Murdoch, via Marcus)

When Everyone Stays Home: Empty Public Spaces During Coronavirus (The Atlantic, via Benoit)

#IWD2020

International Women’s Day 2020: Close to three in ten men say sexual jokes or stories at work are acceptable (Ipsos MORI)

Americans overestimate voters’ prejudices against women and ethnic minorities* (The Economist)

What do we know about gender inequality in the UK? (ONS)

Cabinet and civil service gender balance (Ketaki and me for IfG)

Seven in ten support equal coverage for women’s sport, but not at the cost of men’s coverage (YouGov)

A dozen+ visionary pioneers who did great (and good) things with data visualization (RJ Andrews)

Would making salaries public help end disparities?* (FT)

#Budget2020

The budget in charts - Tom, Graham (IfG)

Spring Budget 2020: IFS analysis (IFS)

The Stupidest Budget of All Time* (Tortoise)

Spring Budget 2020 response (Resolution Foundation)

Life and death

Why we run (Strava)

Diabetes risk: what’s driving the global rise in obesity rates?* (FT)

How Working-Class Life Is Killing Americans, in Charts* (New York Times)

Middle-aged generation most likely to die by suicide and drug poisoning (ONS, from 2019)

Changing trends in mortality by leading causes of death, England and Wales: 2001 to 2018 (ONS)

Mortality and life expectancy trends in the UK (The Health Foundation)

Everything else

Political trust (Will Jennings via Alex)

British Election Study 2019 Data Release – Internet Panel, Results File, and Expert Survey

Ministers (me for IfG)

Political protests have become more widespread and more frequent* (The Economist)

Getting moving: Where will transport infrastructure investment unlock city-centre growth? (Centre for Cities)

45 Minute Cities (Alasdair Rae)

National Primary Results Map: Where Biden and Sanders Have Won* (New York Times)

Joe Biden’s surge poses threat to Bernie Sanders’ US primary hopes* (FT)

Meta data

Viral content

Five ways coronavirus could shape our digital future (Jonathan Tanner for the Overseas Development Institute)

Coronavirus divides tech workers into the 'worthy' and 'unworthy' sick (The Guardian)

Coronavirus: A Digital Governance Emergency of International Concern (CIGI)

Fact Check Explorer: Coronavirus (Google)

NHS announces plan to combat coronavirus fake news (The Guardian)

Facts on Coronavirus (Full Fact)

Sifting Through the Coronavirus Outbreak (Mike Caulfield)

The Simplest Way to Spot Coronavirus Misinformation on Social Media (OneZero)

CORONAVIRUS and HAKKAR THE SOULFLAYER'S CORRUPTED BLOOD! Or what do people actually do in a pandemic? (Alex Krasodmoski)

On TikTok, coronavirus is just another way to gain clout* (New Statesman)

Chinese social media sites blocked medical information about the coronavirus, research indicates (Poynter)

Boris Johnson Has Summoned Major Tech Companies To Downing Street To Help In The Fight Against The Coronavirus (BuzzFeed)

Inside Dominic Cummings’s coronavirus meeting with big tech* (Wired)

How a global health crisis turns into a state-run surveillance opportunity (The Observer)

CIO interview: Sarah Wilkinson, NHS Digital (Computer Weekly)

#OpenDataDay

Celebrating the tenth Open Data Day on Saturday 7th March 2020 (Open Knowledge)

Celebrating Open Data Day around the world (Open Knowledge)

What is ‘open data’ and why should we care? (ODI)

What @instituteforgov is able to do with #opendata (IfG)

#opendataday, #ODD2020, #OpenDataDay2020

#Budget2020

Me

Peter Wells

Owen Boswarva

What Works Centres

Digital markets taskforce: terms of reference (BEIS/DCMS/CMA)

If we want cutting-edge R&D, we must rethink our attitude to failure (Hetan Shah in City AM)

#IWD2020

In a world biased against women, what role do algorithms play? (CDEI)

Mapping Gender Data Gaps: An SDG Era Update (Data2X)

Why cars are unsafe for women* (Caroline Criado Perez for the Sunday Times)

Why the web needs to work for women and girls (Sir Tim Berners-Lee)

International Women’s Day: celebrating the black women tackling bias in AI (Ada Lovelace Institute)

UK government

The UK’s national data strategy is still missing in action (New Statesman)

Does Brexit Britain have a data strategy fit for purpose? - the public sector perspective (diginomica)

Price and prejudice: automated decision-making and the UK government (podcast) (openDemocracy)

The UK Has Slumped in Open Data Rankings: This Should Trouble All of US (Jeni Tennison in Computer Business Review)

MANUFACTURING THE FUTURE: COULD HEALTHCARE DATA HELP REBALANCE THE UK’S ECONOMY? (Reform)

Designing an Information Governance approach for London (LOTI)

Case for helping join up government services (GDS)

MPs told to hold to account those responsible for Post Office Horizon IT scandal (Computer Weekly)

UK.gov is not sharing Brits' medical data among different agencies... but it's having a jolly good think about it (The Register)

The UK’s tech sector has much to be optimistic about (Matt Warman MP for CapX)

I’ve written a bot @UKreleases that tweets out all the transparency releases governments departments post on http://gov.uk (Jon Stone)

At least 20,000 people denied information that could prove right to live in UK (The Independent)

DCMS to examine government data-sharing barriers ahead of programme of ‘radical and transformative change’ (Public Technology, via Colm)

We’re hosting a community meet-up to discuss how we archive data (Technology in Government)

Harnessing the potential of linked administrative data for the justice system (ADR UK)

AI, IoT, tech, etc

AI needs more regulation, not less (Brookings)

AI In Policing: Better Than A Knife Through The Chest? (Forbes)

Better intelligence about artificial intelligence (Nesta)

Reset (Luminate)

IoT Week[note 32] (LOTI)

Everything else

David Hand on Dark Data (Princeton University Press)

We Built a Database of Over 500 iPhones Cops Have Tried to Unlock (Motherboard)

The Robots Are Coming: Ethics, Politics, and Society in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Kenneth A. Taylor, Boston Review)

How our network is considering data ethics: survey results (ODI)

Researcher danah boyd on how to protect the census and fix tech (Protocol)

How close is humanity to destroying itself?* (The Spectator)

Stealth political ads flourish on Facebook* (Politico)

#NICAR, #NICAR2020

William Gibson on the apocalypse: “it’s been happening for at least 100 years”* (New Statesman)

A Dataset is a Worldview (Hannah Davis)

Centre Write: Digital disruption? (Bright Blue)

Facebook sued by Australian information watchdog over Cambridge Analytica-linked data breach (The Guardian)

Frontex hits activist pair with €24,000 legal bill (EUobserver, via Giuseppe)

A catalogue of things that are stopping change: part II (Rose Mortada and James Reeve)

Opportunities

JOB: Senior Researcher - Whitehall Monitor (IfG)

JOB: Data Journalist / Research Analyst (Spend Network)

JOB: Team Lead - Data Technology (Data Unit) (DfT)

JOB: Policy Fellow (Digital Technology) (The King's Fund)

JOB: Data Science Campus Delivery Manager (ONS)

JOB: Social Media and Engagement Journalist (FT)

JOB: Partnerships and Community Manager (Understanding Patient Data)

JOB: Head of Public Policy (ODI)

JOBS: Good Things Foundation

EVENT: Digital Insight and Business Intelligence in Local Gov 2020 (London Borough of Redbridge and techUK, via Martin)

And finally...

Love in the time of quarantine

I made a graph of old relationships... (Jeremiah Lowin)

BETWEEN THE SPREADSHEETS (1843, via Alice)

I Work from Home (The New Yorker, via David)

Pi Day tomorrow

How a farm boy from Wales gave the world pi (The Conversation)

Even After 31 Trillion Digits, We’re Still No Closer To The End Of Pi (FiveThirtyEight)

Pi Day: How One Irrational Number Made Us Modern* (New York Times)

A colorful π chart (Datawrapper)

Everything else

What's your beverage of choice? (Jess Walker)

Cognition (Steve Stewart-Williams)

This is the scale of the universe (How Things Work)

[tomwolfgangascott]

Global Conspiracy Theory Attacks

This post originally appeared on Yale on 19 November 2019

Security challenge: As local news media deteriorate, conspiracy theories, crafted to incite fear and tarnish achievements, flourish online.

With local news in decline and more legitimate news behind internet paywalls, readers turn to social media where conspiracy theories are plentiful. Some conspiracy theories emerge from anxiety, such as parents worrying about the side effects of vaccinations for children. Others are deliberate misinformation campaigns crafted to target marginalized populations, weaken social cohesion, increase fear and belittle achievements. “Some individuals struggle to form communities because they harbor politically incorrect thoughts and meet resistance,” explains Tom Ascott, the digital communications manager for the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. “Yet racist, sexist, homophobic and alt-right communities thrive online. Such communities might be small and inconsequential in any one geographic area, but the internet presents a border-free world, allowing niche, politically incorrect views to thrive.” Website managers analyze which content draws the most users and engagement – often the most outrageous, sensational tales along with conspiracy theories. Ascott offers recommendations. Companies should end “likes” and other popularity measures, prohibit falsehoods and revise algorithms that repeatedly spoon-feed content that reinforces views. Societies must invest in open data sources. Individual users must recognize expertise and apply critical reading skills, including consideration of sources with double checks and fact checks. – YaleGlobal

The internet has given conspiracy theories a global platform. While traditional local news media deteriorate, the borders for online communities are broadening, offering weird beliefs that pose political, security and economic implications.

Conspiracy theories are common, and all countries struggle with them. In Poland the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk that killed the former president became fodder for conspiracy theories. And on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA contended with accusations that the moonlanding was filmed on a soundstage, the earth is flat and the moon is a hologram. Spain’s fact-checking site Newtral set out to fight the mistruths.

As some people find social interactions more challenging, online platforms provide outlets for expression. A vicious cycle develops: As people spend more time online, they find personal interactions more challenging and experience social anxiety, prompting more online interactions. The preference to communicate through technology on its own might not be a problem, but can deter the ability to form communities in real life.

Some individuals struggle to form communities because they harbor politically incorrect thoughts and meet resistance. Yet racist, sexist, homophobic and alt-right communities thrive online. Such communities might be small and inconsequential in any one geographic area, but the internet presents a border-free world, allowing niche, politically incorrect views to thrive. As a result, politically incorrect views become less niche. The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities estimates 60 percent of Britons believe in a conspiracy theory. In France, it’s 79 percent.

Conspiracy theorists and anti-establishment alt-right groups are not distinct, and an investigation by Aric Toler for Bellingcat, the investigative journalism website, suggests the two camps share vocabulary. Embracing conspiracy theories goes along with “rejecting all political and scientific authority, thus changing your entire worldview.”

Rejection of basic and institutional truths contributes to an individual’s vulnerability to radicalization and a rise in extremist views. Internet platforms, whether social media giants like YouTube or Twitter or small online magazines, thrive on clicks and engagement, and operators are keenly aware that outrageous comments or conspiracy theories drive engagement. Bloomberg recently implied that YouTube is aware of the radicalizing effect of video algorithms, offering related content that reinforces users’ views. It is a Pyrrhic success, though, as content fuels disillusionment, frustration and anger.

Algorithms are designed to keep users on the site as long as possible. So, if users search for content opposing vaccinations, YouTube continues serving more anti-vaccination content. A Wellcome study has shown residents of high-income countries report the lowest confidence in vaccinations. France reports the lowest level of trust, with 33 percent reporting they “do not believe that vaccines are safe.”

Such reinforcement algorithms can challenge core democratic ideals, like freedom of speech, by deliberately undermining the marketplace of ideas. The belief underpinning free speech is that truth surfaces through transparent discourse that identifies and counters maliciously false information. Yet the notion of automatic algorithms contribute to a situation that every view is valid and carries equal weight, culminating in the “death of expertise.” When it comes to complex, technical and specialist subjects, everyone’s view is not equally valid.

There is nothing wrong with challenging democratic ideals in an open and earnest debate — this is how democracy evolves. Women won the right to vote through open and free discourse. But posts designed to undermine the marketplace of ideas challenge nations’ ontological security – or the security of a state’s own self-conception. If pushed too far, commonly accepted ideas that are held to be true –the world is round; science, democracy and education are good – could start to collapse and jeopardize national security.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that political messaging could be made more effective by targeting smaller cohorts of people categorized into personality groups. Once platforms and their clients have this information, Jack Clark, head of policy at OpenAI, warns that “Governments can start to create campaigns that target individuals.” Campaigns, relying on machine learning, could optimize ongoing and expanding propaganda seen only by select groups. Some conspiracy theories are self-selecting, with users seeking out the details they want to see. This contrasts with targeted misinformation that typically indicates information warfare.

Propaganda campaigns need not be entirely fictitious and can represent partial reality. It is possible to launch a conspiracy theory using real resources: Videos showing only one angle of events can be purported to show the whole story, or real quotes can be misattributed or taken out of context. The most tenacious conspiracy theories reflect some aspect of reality, often using videos showing a misleading series of events, making these much harder to disprove with other media.

In authoritarian countries, with less reliable repositories of institutional data, fact checking is difficult. In Venezuela, open data sources are being closed, and websites that debunk false news and conspiracy theories are blocked. This problem is not new, stemming from the same dictatorial philosophy that leads regimes to imprison journalists or shut down public media stations.

Video is becoming more unstable as a medium for truth, with deepfakes, videos manipulated by deep-learning algorithms, allowing for “rapid and widespread diffusion” and new evidence for conspiracy theories. Creators churn out products with one person’s face convincingly placed over a second’s person’s face, spouting a third person’s words. There is an ongoing arms race between the effectiveness of these tools and the forensic methods that detect manipulation.

Content still can be fact-checked by providers or users, though this is a slow process. Once a theory or video goes online, the debunking often doesn’t matter if viewers are determined to stand by their views. Users can post content on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media without fact-checking, though Facebook has come under fire for allowing political advertisements to make false claims. Twitter avoids the issue by banning political ads that mention specific candidates or bills.

Conspiracy theorists are also adept at repackaging. For example, any tales related to the rollout of 5G are “rehashed from 4G.” Likewise, the Notre Dame fire quickly produced anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic theories. Conspiracy theorists link new theories to old ones. In the minds of conspiracy theorists, despite evidence to the contrary, such connections give greater weight to the new theory as continuation of an established idea they have already accepted as true.

A government can refute conspiracy theories to prevent, as in the case of Notre Dame, anti-Semitic sentiment. As trust in government and politicians declines, the ability to fight rumors falls. Marley Morris describes the cycle for Counterpoint: “low levels of trust in politicians can cause people to resort to conspiracy theories for their answers and in turn conspiracy theories construct alternative narratives that make politicians even less likely to be believed.”

James Allworth, head of innovation at Cloudflare, proposes banning algorithmic recommendations or prioritization of results for user-generated content. Policy ideas like this as well as internal regulations such as Instagram masking “likes” in six countries, and then globally, indicate appetite for industry change.

There are solutions at the individual level, too, including deputizing users to flag and report false or misleading content. The paradox is that users reporting problem content are not typical viewers or believers. It’s human nature to be curious about controversial content and engage. And unfortunately, according to Cunningham’s law, “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.”

[scifigeneration]

Facts versus feelings isn't the way to think about communicating science

by John Cook and Sander van der Linden

The message might not come through if you put all your communication eggs in one theoretical basket. buydeephoto/Shutterstock.com

In a world where “post-truth” was 2016’s word of the year, many people are starting to doubt the efficacy of facts. Can science make sense of anti-science and post-truthism? More generally, how can we understand what drives people’s beliefs, decisions and behaviors?

Scientists have developed many theories to describe how people process and think about information. Unfortunately, there’s an increasing tendency to see people as creatures whose reasoning mechanisms are largely dependent on a narrow set of processes. For example, one popular theory suggests that if we just communicate more accurate information to people, their behavior will change accordingly. Another suggests that people will reject evidence if it threatens their deeply held cultural worldviews and associated feelings.

It’s more important than ever that our approach to communication is evidence-based and built on a strong, theoretical foundation. Many of these models contribute valuable insights and can help us design better communication, but each on its own is incomplete. And science communicators have a tendency to oversimplify, focusing on a single model and disregarding other theories.

We suggest that this is a dangerous practice and less effective than a more nuanced and holistic view. The apparent choice between “fact” and “feeling,” or between “cognition” and “culture,” is a false dilemma. In reality, both are related and address different pieces of the decision-making puzzle.

Thinking versus feeling

One well-known theory about how people absorb new facts is the “information deficit model.” The main idea here is straightforward: If you throw more facts at people, they’ll eventually come around on an issue.

Most behavioral science scholars agree that this model of human thinking and behavior is clearly incomplete – people rely on a range of other cues besides facts in guiding their attitudes and behavior. For example, sometimes we simply act based on how we feel about an issue. Unfortunately, the facts don’t always convince.

But the term “information deficit” is problematic, too. People tend to have limited information in most areas of life. For example, we often don’t know the thoughts and feelings of other people we trust and value. Similarly, we might have limited knowledge about appropriate cultural norms when traveling to a new country, and so on. Information deficit isn’t a very meaningful term to use to theorize about human thinking.

Another theory about human thinking is called “cultural cognition.” In brief, it suggests that our cultural values and worldviews shape how we think about science and society.

It’s easy to be duped into thinking of the human brain as a sponge that soaks up only the information it wants to believe. For example, the theory suggests that people’s position on divisive issues such as climate change is not informed by scientific evidence but rather by the strong commitment people have to their political groups and ideologies. The idea is that to protect our cultural worldviews, we actively reject evidence that threatens them – think of someone who fears that government action on climate change undermines the free market.

In short, this narrative sounds appealing on the surface, as humans organize themselves in groups, and much psychological research has shown that we derive part of our social identities from the group affiliations we maintain.

Yet, its focus is overly narrow, and there’s a logical fallacy in this conception of human thinking. We belong to many groups at any given time and we juggle many different public and private identities. The real question is about nuance; when and under what conditions is someone motivated to reject scientific facts in favor of their cultural worldview?

It’s not a zero sum contest between feelings and facts. haryigit/Shutterstock.com

Either/or misses the point

To throw all our fact-disseminating eggs into one or the other theoretical basket is oversimplistic and deprives us of important insights.

A more nuanced perspective recognizes that facts and information are embedded in social and cultural contexts. For example, people’s perception of expert consensus matters a great deal, especially on contested issues, and is often described as a gateway belief that influences a range of other attitudes about an issue. The near-unanimous consensus that vaccines do not cause autism or that climate change is human-caused are all scientific facts. At the same time, consensus information is also inherently social: It describes the extent of agreement within an influential group of experts.

People often want to be accurate in their views, and, in an uncertain world bounded by limited time and effort, we make strategic bets on what information to take into account. Consensus acts as a natural heuristic, or mental shortcut, for complicated scientific issues. Numerous studies have found that highlighting scientific agreement on human-caused global warming can help neutralize and reduce conflicting views about climate change.

Similarly, while some studies have found a limited effect of knowledge on judgment, when you dig deeper into the data, a more nuanced and insightful picture emerges. For example, some studies claim that a deficit in scientific “knowledge” does not explain why people are divided on contested issues such as climate change. But what’s being measured in these experiments matters. Indeed, indicators such as how well people understand numbers or their scientific literacy – which is what some of these studies actually quantify – are categorically different from measuring specific knowledge people have about a topic such as climate change. In fact, a survey across six countries found that when people understand the causes of climate change, their concern increases accordingly, irrespective of their values. Similarly, other studies show that explanations about the mechanisms of climate change can reduce biased evaluations of evidence as well as political polarization.

In short, facts do matter.

How people think is complex and nuanced

Indeed, there is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, we need to dispel false dichotomies and folk psychology about human thinking that currently dominate the media. Repeating the story that people don’t care about facts runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. A holistic view acknowledges that people rely on cognitive shortcuts and emotions, care about social norms and group identities and are sometimes motivated in their reasoning, but it also recognizes the research showing that most people want to fundamentally hold accurate perceptions about the world.

This is particularly important as the public is currently hampered by misinformation and fake news. In two separate studies, we each found that misinformation about climate change has a disproportionate influence on public attitudes and opinion. However, we also found that inoculating people against the false arguments neutralized misinformation’s influence, across the political spectrum. In essence, teaching people what false arguments might be deployed helped them overcome their cultural biases. Other work similarly shows that the politicization of science can be counteracted with inoculation.

People are complex, social and affected by a diverse range of influences depending on the situation. We want to hold accurate views, but emotion, group identities and conflicting goals can get in the way. Incorporating these different insights into human thinking enriches our understanding of how people form opinions and make decisions.

Effective science communication requires an inclusive, holistic approach that integrates different social science perspectives. To simplistically focus on a single perspective paints a limited and increasingly inaccurate view of how humans form judgments about social and scientific issues.

John Cook is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University. Sander van der Linden is Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

[nemolian]

Dunning-Kruger meets fake news

The Dunning-Kruger effect is perhaps both one of the the most famous biases in human behavior—and the most predictable. It posits that people who don't understand a topic also lack sufficient knowledge to recognize that they don't understand it. Instead, they know just enough to convince themselves they're completely on top of the topic, with results ranging from hilarious to painful.

Inspired by the widespread sharing of news articles that are blatantly false, a team of US-based researchers looked into whether Dunning-Kruger might be operating in the field of media literacy. Not surprisingly, people do, in fact, overestimate their ability to identify misleading news. But the details are complicated, and there's no obvious route to overcoming this bias in any case.

Evaluating the news

Media literacy has the potential to limit the rapid spread of misinformation. Assuming people care about the accuracy of the things they like or share—something that's far from guaranteed—a stronger media literacy would help people evaluate if something was likely to be accurate before pressing that share button. Evaluating the credibility of sources is an essential part of that process.

And assessing credibility is a skill—and it's one that people can clearly be bad at. This leaves people open to Dunning-Kruger. So, the researchers involved here arranged a set of experiments to find out whether Dunning-Kruger was an issue.

The basic test was straightforward. Relying on a couple of YouGov panels, the researchers gave the participants a set of actual headlines and asked the participants to rate the headlines for accuracy. Without being told the results of the test, the participants were then asked to rate their own performance compared to the average person.

Assuming that people could rate themselves accurately, you'd expect that about half of them would rate themselves above average while the other half rated themselves below average. But that's nowhere close to what was seen. Ninety percent of the participants claimed they were "above average in their ability to discern false and legitimate news headlines." The average self-reported ability outperformed 69 percent of other people.

This, on its own, could simply be representative of a general overconfidence. To find out whether the least competent were the most likely to overestimate their abilities, the researchers broke up participants into four groups based on their performance. The bottom quartile accurately judged accuracy about 10 percent of the time, and the top quartile was close to 90 percent accurate.

The top quartile also underestimated its own performance by about 15 percentage points. The above-average quartile were roughly accurate in terms of their self-assessment, and performance estimates went downhill from there. The lowest quartile showed a 40 percentage-point gap between their self assessment and their actual performance. While the less competent didn't rate themselves as highly as the top performers, this is clearly a case of Dunning-Kruger.

In news that should surprise no one, men were more likely to have an inflated sense of their own media literacy. Republicans also fell into this category, which is not shocking given the high levels of misinformation about the election and pandemic currently appearing on right-wing news sites.

Big mismatch, minor effects

While that's an important finding on its own, the big questions are how this inflated sense of competence influences people's decisions about consuming and sharing news reports. Here, the researchers benefitted from the YouGov panel, where a number of participants had agreed to share their browsing history anonymously (this was gathered by a combination of browser plugins and VPN service).

The researchers broke down visits to news and commentary sites based on whether the site had a history of spreading misinformation. In terms of exposure to misinformation, overconfidence was associated with a slight increase—in other words, the stronger the Dunning-Kruger effect, the more likely someone was to visit the sites that frequently post false stories. The effect, however, was minor. Those with the strongest misplaced confidence in their own abilities were only 6 percent more likely to view misinformation than those with a reasonable appraisal of their own abilities.

A separate set of questions indicated that the misplaced confidence was associated with an increased willingness to share false stories, although again, the effect was fairly small. This willingness was influenced by whether the false story was consistent with people's political beliefs. Part of the problem is that people with overconfidence in their media savvy have a harder time discerning true and false stories than people with actual media skills.

Overall, we shouldn't be surprised that Dunning-Kruger applies to media literacy as well. And, while the effects were small, if they replicate, they'll help improve our understanding of the misinformation landscape. The new research makes an interesting comparison with an earlier study that indicated the average person was pretty good at recognizing misinformation but didn't always bother to apply that skill before sharing or liking a story.

The depressing part of the present research, however, is that there's a fair bit of literature on attempts to correct for Dunning-Kruger, and most of it describes failure. "Studies suggest that low performers genuinely believe in their own abilities and are not simply making face-saving expressions of self-worth," the researchers note, and they add that Dunning-Kruger is generally associated with "resistance to help, training, and corrections."

So, even as we get a better grip on the factors influencing the misinformation flood we're facing, we're not necessarily getting closer to identifying what to do about it.

PNAS, 2021. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2019527118  (About DOIs).

via:Ars Technica, June 2, 2021 at 02:56PM

[edris120324]

critically compiled document on the topics addressed in the blog, plus a correlation to course material.

  ID: 120324

#MASS2620_20

Issues in Mass Communication spring 20

Date: May 31, 2020

#SQUTR

  Introduction:

The media and communications in the modern era have become major roles in the educational, informative and educational communication process, opening the doors of knowledge legitimate, as they have become the first means that transcended borders due to modern technological development, and due to the spread of information and communication technology, and we have become in front of one village that has no limits except illiteracy.  The alphabet and information.. The production, dissemination and use of information in light of media globalization and globalization of information has become among the most important manifestations of technological progress that produced knowledge societies, and made knowledge contributions in various fields, whether it comes to high Humanitarian or social, so that interest in development has become an urgent requirement and the media spotlight on issues is more urgent.

The world today, with its openness and the interconnection of its means of communication with each other, is no longer immune to the necessity of seeking to achieve the development of peoples who are still underdeveloped, far from achieving human dignity in a decent life, away from achieving prosperity and prosperity with light years.. Therefore, interest in development  By harnessing all the mass communication tools associated with information and communication technology, it would at least contribute to raising awareness and creating a new, more positive, Dynamics to advance the standard of living of the individual and the group

  We have great strides ahead of us today, as media professionals, challenges that we must all work to overcome for a society that is aware of its responsibilities, a society that enjoys freedom of expression, freely circulates information, ideas and knowledge ... a society that has rights and duties, integrated in work

So I will analyze some topics related to media issues

Submitted material:

We begin the analysis with the most problem facing the media and the most harmful to society, which is misleading, which is caused by this problem emotional, physical and financial damage.

  What's more, misleading can also be on purpose or not.  The first is clear, but how misinformation can occur without the intention of the data source to deceive the person.  This may happen when a person misunderstands the information provided by the source or the source may want to convey a specific message to the audience but the way the information was written indicates something else that was not planned by the data source.

  And also from the problems faced by the media

Concerning misinformation and prejudice is hate speech. Online communication stations have become a slope of many natural disasters and armed conflicts;  Social media and messaging apps will help people keep their family and friends, and get information, such as where they can be provided or medical help.  These messages are often applicable analog and democratic communication systems that have a special ability to feel tensions between different groups and failures in violence between their members, and this information can directly affect how people are prepared to confront, confront and solve these types of problems.

  Cognitive strategies are the major goals of many intervention approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapies, mindfulness interventions, treatment, acceptance, and commitment.  Cognitive strategies are groups of mental processes that are consciously implemented to organize intellectual processes and content in order to achieve goals or solve problems. Theories of self-regulation of behavior focus on cognitive strategies as they play a critical role in guiding goal-oriented behavior.  Also, attention must be paid to knowledge strategies in the media to facilitate the delivery of messages to consumers and markets by identifying consumers and target markets.

  As for the means of communication used in the Cold War, the first and the second, they were all used in different means of communication, such as lamps, fires, smoke, birds, and dogs, and all of these methods were used based on decisions and responsibilities that were studied after deep and conscientious thinking. As for the Iraq war here  The methods differed, as modern technology was used, such as telephone, radio and television.

  It is clear that societies are increasing in their anger towards those who see that the celebrations of communication sites have become more and more open and open and exceed the rules and norms recognized in society, which led to the forgetting of old customs and the recognition of new customs or new fashion;  New technology gave us a kind of the era of freedom, but it took some of our valuable habits from us.

 Technology strives to convince society of behaviors and habits that are not identical to society and make it daily behaviors and habits so that it becomes one of the habits welcomed in society through fashions and people famous in social networking sites; Which affect their behavior with the people of the society, which becomes the habits of these fashions, as if they were welcome ideas in society and become influential in the behavior of society .

  In the face of the absence and distortion of sexual minorities in the media and their unprofessional and self-use of these minorities and the continued violation of the rights of sexual minorities and the spread of hate speech and calls for violence against homosexuals on social networks, the media should have the power to defend this group and decisions must be taken in whom  It harms them, there is an alternative strategy that aims to spread the culture of accepting the other, without discrimination or prejudice, and to combat "homophobia" as the main cause of homosexual violations and attacks.

  In light of the multiplicity, diversity and escalation of crises, the importance of the media's role in crisis management is clear in terms of its role in its events or contributing to its exacerbation or resolution, as the media agencies control information and action. To determine what news the audience gets and how to interpret it. Therefore, the media must present the information without misinformation as well as without prejudice, and they must bear decisions and responsibilities

   The main role of the media is to emphasize the interest of the citizen, to be aware of everything that could harm him, create a sense of collective responsibility, and emphasize the spirit of complementarity and cooperation between citizens.

  Caricature is one of the plastic arts that loved the hearts and minds of people, not only because it "makes them laugh" and relieves them of some of what they find in their difficult reality, but also for his boldness in expressing them and interests.

   However, the question remains about its impact and its ability to solve or ridicule problems.  But in my view, this animation helps to understand the problem and solve it through the ability of all age groups to understand the problem through this animation without talking about the problem in its details.  In addition, it increases people's awareness of the seriousness of this problem and how to deal with it.  Moreover, it is seen as a warning to people about the negative consequences of their neglect of this problem.  Therefore, the media must be proficient in choosing cartoons and not use it to harm a certain group.

  Conclusion:

The media plays an important role within every society, in terms of educating people with news, information and ideas, and the media is an important source of awareness and building community thought, as it has a significant impact on the process of forming public opinion, as well as influencing the formation of their interests and attitudes of attention to societal issues that Society may be oblivious or distracted from it for several reasons, including:

- The familiarity between the community and these issues, to the extent that the community considered them familiar despite their seriousness

Desperation to fix it.

- Fear of talking about it in order not to impose on ourselves a commitment to a particular political or intellectual position that some of us do not like to commit themselves to or disclose to others about it

The lack of experience and the lack of sufficient awareness among media professionals and society activists in general of the importance of these issues

- Search for easy and ready media activity such as news, press releases, and general political and social criticism.

[techietrends]

A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

[lippyawards]

A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

A New Study Indicates Humans Self-Generate Misinformation

A delightful mess of Google-colored cables

A new study into sources of misinformation suggests that humans self-generate it on a regular basis by misrecalling information they’ve previously learned in ways that fit already-existing opinions and biases.

The term misinformationis specifically defined as Merriam-Webster as “incorrect or misleading information.” It is distinct from terms…

[doubletyforce-blog]

THE ONLIFE

How many minutes have you spent on the internet today?

For a growing proportion of the world, our lives are increasingly lived online. Our ‘onlives’ make us gloriously connected, grant us myriad opportunities to reinvent ourselves, to learn, to innovate, to access life-saving advice and assistance, and to teleport an endless cornucopia of goods to our front doors.

But there are signs that living perpetually plugged-in is bringing unintended consequences. The dark side is expressing itself in our politics, our mental health, our screen addictions and our social cohesion. As we are gamed at every turn to keep scrolling, keep watching, keep tapping, our valuable attention is diffused between the promise of endless dopamine hits, buzzing notifications and tides of information.

How can we ensure the internet is a force for good in the disruptive years to come?

TODAY’S PICTURE

Social media platforms have become hotbeds for extreme views.

In 2018 Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of Congress over mishandling of data and privacy, and we became starkly aware of just how unregulated a space the online world has become. Social media platforms have become hotbeds for extreme views, terrorism, witch-hunts, and trolls; the domain of deep-fakes, data breaches, swarms of bots, and fake news.

Many of these are the surface-level expression of the ‘attention economy’ business model of internet platforms that seek to stimulate a user’s emotional response by perpetuating polarisation, shock and novelty, where the product is your attention span.20 Indeed, many internet companies employ specialist Attention Engineers programming us with manipulative design tactics in an arms race towards addiction.

Hooked, our onlives have become canvases onto which we paint meticulously curated, and often misleading identities. We have a 24/7/365 window into the self-promoted lives of those more successful, more wealthy, more beautiful and more popular than we are - a global consciousness our brains just aren’t wired for.

Business models built on ad revenue and attention, surveillance, centralisation of power, lack of tech-giant accountability, and a paucity of regulation – these are all systemic, structural problems that form the foundation of our onlives. It is from here that the patterns and events emerge and multiply. Beyond the malign political influence, studies show strong causal links between burgeoning internet use and reductions in analytical and problem-solving skills, memory creation, critical thinking and empathy, as well as spikes in anxiety.

In short, our onlives are rewiring our brains, our politics, our social interaction, and even the climate - the gargantuan amount of energy and materials required are set to exceed 14% of global emissions by 2040.22 Is it time to step back?

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS?

There are many implications for sustainability, but here are three which stand out.

Firstly, with half the world coming online in 2019, we’re going to have to accelerate the energy revolution to keep those chargers plugged in without destroying the planet. Secondly, amid information overload, the sustainability community must learn the tricks of the trade in raising awareness and getting the most pressing challenges the attention they deserve in a distracted world. Thirdly, we need to look at our own ability to create change. Shifting entire systems and tackling global challenges is thorough, focused work. If every waking hour is spent in a state of fragmented attention, we weaken our capabilities for creating system change. If society is increasingly herded into ghettos of political persuasion and identity, our ability to cooperate is undermined. As more of the world logs on, we should also view it as a growing percentage of the world vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation.

So what can be done? As with all these dynamic areas, there are multiple possible futures open to us. The internet we have now isn’t the only one possible.

Internet, or internets? It’s perhaps outdated to talk about the internet when there are already at least four: China’s firewall-enclosed version, the GDPR internet, the Wild-West Web outside that, and the shadowy Dark Web.23 Advocates for a repurposed internet include its own founding-father Tim Berners-Lee, and professor of internet-law Jonathan Zittrain. They are calling for the a wholesale reinvention of the internet to create a regulated, equitable space, promising to protect users from hate and prejudice, fake news and data exploitation.

Governments and regulators are likely to regularly and heavily scrutinise tech giants from 2019 onwards.

There have even been calls for an age restriction on social media use, to protect the most vulnerable, and for Facebook and Google and the like to become public utilities regulated by governments.24 For future generations, as well as current internet users, education on how to navigate the onlife should be de rigueur. Learning to detect real from fake, how to maintain an on/offline balance, how to use, and not be used by, social media are critical skills for maintaining both mental health and social cohesion.

In the face of the disruption to come we can, and must, step back and reconfigure our relationship with living online, for our own resilience and that of our communities; digging deep to assess what it really means to be connected and what it means to be human.

SIGNALS OF CHANGE

Earlier this year WhatsApp added labels to indicate when a message has been forwarded, partly in response to fake news about rumoured child kidnappings disseminated via WhatsApp, which led to a spate of lynchings in India. The company is now imposing limits on how many groups a single message can be sent to. India is currently WhatsApp’s largest market with over 200 million users.

The NHS is due to launch its first ever clinic for internet and gaming addictions following growing concern over the problem and the World Health Organisation (WHO) classifying it as a mental health condition

In 2018, Donald Trump repealed net neutrality, quashing hopes for a more regulated internet to make it for the many not the few. This opens the door for internet providers to censor or charge for access to certain content and could unfairly penalise small business owners.

A wide range of services including credit scoring, policy making, social media and job recruitment are increasingly mediated by AI, some of which has taken on biases. Trained on historical data and built by humans, a large number of these algorithms threaten to perpetuate existing biases and discriminate on the basis of gender, sexual orientation or race.

An Indian start-up called Metafact is drawing on artificial intelligence to try and combat the fake news crisis. The Delhi-based company founded in 2017 hopes to use AI to empower journalists to identify fake news stories.

You can read this report online at thefuturescentre.org/fos2019

[fitnesswomenshealth-blog]

Dear Men of #MeToo: Abuse Is Behaviour, Not a Symptom of Mental Illness

New Post has been published on https://cialiscom.org/dear-men-of-metoo-abuse-is-behaviour-not-a-symptom-of-mental-illness.html

Dear Men of #MeToo: Abuse Is Behaviour, Not a Symptom of Mental Illness

Trigger warning: Sexual harassment/abuse

The #MeToo movement has served quite a few gals arrive out with their stories of sexual harassment and abuse at the fingers of potent guys. It has also highlighted the difficulties affiliated with mental wellbeing. Lots of ladies have spoken up about the effect of these incidents on survivors and comprehending why women of all ages just take time to come out in the open up with their narratives. At the same time, the much more catchy mentions of ‘mental health’ have been furthered by the adult males accused of sexual harassment and assault them selves, via their very carefully-worded apologies.

Mayank Jain, a journalist at the Company Common, comic Utsav Chakraborty and Abhishek Upadhya, an editor at India Television, tried to use their psychological health troubles as a defence just after currently being accused of predatory conduct by several women of all ages. Phrases like “struggle”, “disease”, “seeking help” and “therapy” were being littered on their Twitter timelines. These terms say things that these adult men want us to know – but do they seriously issue? And why communicate about it now?

Placing lousy mental well being on the table when you are accused of misconduct is a common gambit. Just after the poet Mary Karr wrote about how her previous associate David Foster Wallace had abused her physically and emotionally, a good deal of backlash centered on Wallace’s mental health and fitness troubles. In a personalized essay for the New Yorker, celebrated creator Junot Diaz talked about the repression of his childhood abuse and linked it to the accusations of assaulting and harassing several women of all ages. The courtroom trials of Roman Polanski talked about his ‘mental illness’ quite a few periods, adhering to his arrest for sexually abusing small children.

The similarities are obvious. All these males, and several other individuals, affected generations with their perform in literature and the media, experienced from mental wellness problems and abused these who seemed fewer impressive. Even so, it would be amiss to connect abuse and mental well being.

Initial off, there are similar styles of violence perpetrated by persons with as perfectly as without  a mental health issues. “The intersection of abusers with mental health difficulties is incredibly thin,” Sadaf Vidha, a Mumbai-primarily based psychologist whose clientele includes survivors of gender-based mostly violence, suggests. “Think about it while reversing the roles – when women of all ages or minorities experience from mental wellness difficulties, do we see them routinely abusing or assaulting other persons?”

Exploration denies a website link

Mayank Jain. Credit score: Fb

The affiliation of psychological illness with abusive conduct isn’t new the ‘insanity defence’ is likely its most popular byproduct. Researches have been discovering this relationship for a long time and have observed prevalence of mental sickness in convicted intercourse offenders, but no indicators of a crystal clear lead to-outcome has been located.

A 1999 review by Jenny Muzos of the Australian Institute Of Criminology dispels the fantasy that violent behaviour is involved with mental ailment. It identified that properties of crimes this sort of as homicides fully commited by offenders diagnosed with a mental condition were being no distinct from those of crimes committed by other offenders.

Right after a enterprise collection of scientific studies, Nancy Erickson, an attorney and expert on domestic violence and lawful troubles, concluded that though mental sickness could or may perhaps not exist in abusers, the abuse they inflict is a conduct and not a symptom.

A meta-analysis of many experiments by Andrew Klein, a professor of regulation at the Indiana College, Bloomington, and funded by the US Section of Justice, for the Battered Ladies Justice Task states that men who abuse are no more probable to undergo from mental ailments than the everyday populace. Their paper reads, “Although batterers may perhaps endure from depression or very low self-esteem immediately after getting arrested or restrained, these conditions have not been identified to have caused the abuse.”

Jaydip Sarkar, of the Institute of Mental Overall health, Singapore, asserted in a 2013 assessment of the assessments of psychological wellness of sex offenders in India that rape, sexual harassment and other predatory behaviours are not automatically the result of having a psychological wellbeing challenge.

The difficulty of perpetrators utilizing worry as a final result of work and/or substance abuse as an excuse was reviewed in a 1999 evaluation by Sarah Buel, a law firm and professor at Arizona Point out University. Buel spent 3 decades functioning with survivors of domestic violence and concluded that however violence are not able to be induced by pressure, stress could exacerbate violence.

When abusers use psychological health troubles as a shield, it provides to a horrifying, misinformed and ableist narrative. “Men immediately or indirectly stating that abusive tendencies are because of to mental health troubles, is just a further version of ‘I could not manage my need/anger’,” Vidha additional. “This is a really effectively-known sample. Abusers will blame wellness, exterior environments or the victims, just about anything that will allow them not to take accountability for their misuse of electrical power.”

The get the job done of Lundy Bancroft

Jain’s tweet about him in search of treatment to “reform himself” was very similar to Mark Halperin’s lengthy apology for reportedly assaulting about 50 percent a dozen females through his time at ABC Information, in the early 2000s. In his assertion, Halperin said he sought mental health and fitness counselling immediately after he left ABC.

Be sure to go through my statement under. pic.twitter.com/8ld8k8DC6O

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) Oct 27, 2017

Lundy Bancroft expended decades researching and counselling abusive gentlemen. In his 2002 e-book, Why Does He Do That? Within the Minds of Indignant and Controlling Gentlemen, Bancroft discusses the myth at the rear of utilizing psychological well being as a reason to abuse as very well as to feed misguided beliefs that potentially treatment method that can ‘fix’ these gentlemen.For case in point, on Diaz’s reference to his childhood abuse, Bancroft writes, “… abusive males may possibly obtain that accounts of childhood abuse is one of the very best ways to pull heartstrings.”

Bancroft states that people have the likely to get over psychological injuries from childhood and the impact of these accidents want not thrust the human being to inflict exact behaviour on other individuals.

When Chakraborty described his mental well being, he was making an attempt to sneak it into his apology and lay the ground for sympathy. Bancroft pointedly dismisses this, composing “… abuse is a challenge of values and not of psychology. Psychological disease does not result in abusiveness any longer than alcohol does. Perceptions of daily life circumstances in these males are exact, their minds perform logically and they comprehend induce-effect.”

The very same goes for Jain’s excuse and Upadhya proclaiming to search for professional assistance to deal with “these issues”. Bancroft proceeds, “I have still to fulfill an abuser who has produced any meaningful and lasting alterations in his behaviour by means of therapy no matter of how significantly insight he might have gained.” He also writes that qualified assistance will only help make them “happy, perfectly-adjusted” abusers mainly because interventions like psychotherapy can only tackle problems they are devised to tackle, and abusive conduct is not one of them.

It is also important to differentiate among two types of damaging conduct. One is wherever critical mental disorders like mania could cause a human being to become harmful, as a final result of which they may end up hurting the folks about them. The other is where the destruction is intentional and isn’t motivated by the sickness.

Of program, none of these usually means that any psychological wellness troubles these males might have are invalid or non-existent. They are probable to be as distressing for these males as they are for everyone else. Having said that, the distress does not have something to do with their incapability to understand consent or the company of the females.

“We are a patriarchal culture and allowing for psychological wellness issues to turn out to be an excuse for abuse or assault will lead to huge misuse of insurance policies and legal guidelines like the Mental Health Act,” Vidha claimed about the repercussions of individuals obtaining into these connections. “We want to differentiate amongst what socialisation teaches males that is ‘okay to do’ and what their psychological health and fitness conditions guide them to do.”

Psychological health and fitness problems and predatory behaviour can coexist in a one mind but with some length among each other. There are individuals who do go through from a mental disease and are abusive towards females – and there are also persons with a psychological health issues who do not engage in these types of conduct. This is the place human psychology takes a stage back and phone calls price programs to the phase.

Prateek Sharma is a college student pursuing a master’s diploma in clinical psychology, a researcher and a mental wellbeing activist operating to advertise inclusive psychological health and fitness treatment in India. He tweets @prateekshawarma.

You can follow The Wire‘s in depth coverage of Indian media’s Me Also motion listed here.

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