PATRICE ROSSOU: Separating fact from opinion is not so easy in a data democracy
Information overload reinforces biases by encouraging internet users to read only headlines, writes Patrice Rossou
The contribution of the winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in economics, Richard Thaler, was popularised in his book, Nudge, which postulates that simple tricks can influence behaviour. Interest groups on social media now employ bloggers and influencers to nudge us to buy the latest thing. The act of nudging is evolving into a form of mind control, where the aim is to influence how we think and see the world. Facebook, the social media behemoth with over 2-billion users (making it by far the largest nation on earth), recently reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings and sales up by a staggering 47%. On the downside, it said it was hit by the rising costs of having to counteract "fake news" — a new term in the Oxford English dictionary in 2017. The problem is so bad that it is recruiting 20,000 workers dedicated to keeping fake news off its site. In a world flooded by a data deluge, the only way to cope is to "thin slice" information by reading the headlines rather than the conte...
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