From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   Report on a study   
      
   into why people are more likely to pass on false reports and rumours   
   rather than factual ones.   
      
   Of course, given how politically-charged the issue of what is “lies”   
   and “truth” can be, they chose to base the credibility (or not) of   
   news sources, not on their own judgement, but on a more objective   
   measure, of how often reports from those sources were fact-checked as   
   false.   
      
   What they found was that, often, the people spreading the false   
   stories knew they were false, but passed them on anyway, on the basis   
   of the degree of moral outrage they provoked. In other words, they   
   wanted to push people’s buttons. (I suppose this is the definition of   
   “populism”.)   
      
   And some politicians doing this are not shy about admitting as much:   
      
       Brady pointed to an example from the recent campaign, when a   
       reporter pushed J.D. Vance about false claims regarding immigrants   
       eating pets. “When the reporter pushed him, he implied that yes,   
       it was fabrication, but it was outrageous and spoke to the issues   
       his constituents were mad about,” Brady says. These experiments   
       show that this kind of dishonesty is not exclusive to politicians   
       running for office—people do this on social media all the time.   
      
   Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that “a lie can spread halfway around   
   the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”?   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)