The anatomy of fake news
There was this sense of elation that I felt on Monday when, at exactly 9:40 a.m., the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in the country was officially injected by nurse Chareluck Santos on the arm of Dr. Gerardo Legaspi, director of the University of the Philippines-philippine General hospital (UP-PGH).
Although my family members and I have reservations about the efficacy of Sinovac’s Coronavac, some 600,000 of which were donated by China to the country, I consider the vaccine’s distribution in the country as the “rebirth” of a nation that has been upended by the pandemic for almost a year now. It signals the beginning of a series of moves by the government to roll back restrictive health protocols.
But the administration now faces the daunting task of convincing those who have been brainwashed into thinking that the vaccine will do more harm than good. Surveys conducted by Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia showed people’s distrust of the vaccine, even if it were given away for free. Incredible as it may seem to rational people, there are those who have been hoodwinked by conspiracy theorists and fake news purveyors into believing that the pandemic is a hoax being rammed down our throats by Bill Gates and US pharmaceutical giants, so they could make huge profits from the global sale of the vaccine.
This Qanon line of thinking, which originated from the US, is now being peddled by some Filipinos who passionately believe it to be the Bible truth. Qanon or simply Q, is a disputed far-right conspiracy group espousing a theory that the US Democratic Party is a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles running a global child sextrafficking ring, among other farcical claims, including the Gates-pharma conspiracy theory.
This comical belief has gained traction at the outset of the pandemic among Filipinos cooped up in their respective homes. With the lockdown psychologically weighing down on their mindset, they must have had some of their brain screws loosened, blurring their critical eye, and hampering their ability to discern fact from fiction. They share their misconceptions and false narratives to various social-media platforms in alarming levels and frequency, such that my FB messenger has been deluged by their ludicrous claims.
Perhaps some of them may have been inf luenced early on by Public Attorneys’ Office (PAO) Chief Persida Rueda Acosta who waged in 2018 a hysterically sidesplitting campaign against the Dengvaxia vaccine manufactured by Sanofi Pasteur. Her office had filed several criminal and civil complaints against former and incumbent health officials responsible for the government’s anti-dengue vaccination campaign that used the Dengvaxia jab. Her campaign served as the battering ram that burst open the floodgates of suspicion on vaccines in general.
But what essentially is the reason people fall for fake news?
When someone shouts “Fire!” (even if there’s none) in a crowded movie house, you will witness people jumping up from their seats, frantically looking for the nearest exit. More likely, you’d be among those panicking bodies, pushing against fellow movie-goers for “survival.” Why? You infer that there must indeed be a fire because other people will begin screaming as they scramble over each other to rush out of the cinema. As children, we develop social cognition or the skill to understand and deduce other people’s state of mind based on their intentions, desires, and emotions. In this case, a panic button is pushed within us, triggering our drive to survive a dangerous situation. The people around us believe that a dreadful event is transpiring, and we flee from it because we are not equipped to fight a “fire.”
Most of the time, we mindlessly swallow more information than we can properly chew. Our mind pays little attention to the information’s veracity, merely relying on ancillary material that does not originate from any outward cause or have any logical Interestingly, far-fetched and outrageous claims were ranked at the top of shared fake news stories on Facebook in 2019, according to the nonprofit organization Avaaz, which reported that political fake news garnered more than 150 million views in 2019. basis. We begin to suffer from socalled information overload. With too much data endlessly available and easily accessible to us in this digital world, we get swept up in a deluge of oftentimes unverified social information. When a piece of information results in making us hold two contradictory beliefs, or puts our behavior and belief in misalignment, we begin to suffer from cognitive dissonance. Feelings of unease and tension bubble up within us, causing us to find relief in different ways. Without critical thinking skills, we tend to go with what seems popular or acceptable to most people, regardless of the information’s accuracy, relevance, or logic.
The digital ethos has colored the way we process information. It has spawned something new—total reliance on social information that exposes us to misinformation or disinformation hazards, errors, manipulation or “alternative facts,” a phrase coined by Kellyanne Conway, former counselor of twice-impeached former US president Donald Trump.
Danish researchers Vincent F. Hendricks and Pelle G. Hansen call this an “information storm,” which they define as “a sudden and tempestuous flow of social information suggesting an intriguing alternative to the narratives of human folly and unreason so often applied to fake news and tribal divisions online.”
In their book Infostorm, Hendricks and Hansen point out that “when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof...when we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.”
Interestingly, far-fetched and outrageous claims were ranked at the top of shared fake news stories on Facebook in 2019, according to the nonprofit organization Avaaz, which reported that political fake news garnered more than 150 million views in 2019. Another research done by Dartmouth University computer scientist Soroush Vosoughi, PHD, and colleagues uncovered that more people are reached by fake news that spreads more quickly than the truth.
According to David Rand, PHD, a professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, this development alarms psychologists and other behavioral researchers. “Fake news has important implications in politics, but also in areas such as health and nutrition, climate science, and financial information.” He posited this basic question from a psychological perspective: “How can people possibly believe this stuff?” Rand challenges the idea that it’s our reasoning that is biased. “The dominant explanation for why people believe fake news has been that their reasoning is held captive by partisan biases— their thinking gets hijacked.” His studies paint an alternate picture: “People who believe false things are the people that just don’t think carefully.”
This bolsters my belief that fake news operatives in the employ of corrupt politicians and some business people are taking advantage of some people’s non-existent or reduced critical thinking skills. The inability of social-media users, most especially the youth, to think critically is what enables these fake news purveyors to manipulate information to benefit themselves or their clients. A case in point was the proliferation of social-media news—due largely to his family’s and supporters’ ongoing revisionist campaign—that Ferdinand Marcos was the best president the Philippines ever had, exonerating him all of his misdeeds during his tumultuous 20-year dictatorship. The false narrative has been lapped up by the gullible and the opportunists who have shared it a thousand times over.
The takeaway, Rand says, “is that people who scroll quickly through social media might be less susceptible to misinformation if they simply slow down to consider what they’re reading,” explaining that “our findings suggest that getting people to reason more is a good thing.” He says, “When you’re on social media, stop and think.”