Read this to be misinformed
Notes From the Desk: No. 21 - 2024.01.25
Notes From the Desk are periodic posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary that might otherwise be a tweet or note.
The tragedy of self-inflicted misinformation
How many will read beyond that headline? If you look for statistics on headlines vs. content, you will find estimates that around 60-80% read only the headlines and nothing further.
Considering that most headlines often represent extreme exaggerations or even opposite perspectives to entice engagement, the viewpoint people walk away with is distorted accordingly.
But it is even worse!
I suspect it is much worse than 60-80% ignore the content. Based on my data I can track. I found that for Reddit posts that reference articles on my blog the number who would would even view the article was less than 1%.
Far greater than 90% of the comments on those posts would assume the content of the linked article which makes for impossible conversations.
The Early Commenter Effect
Additionally, an effect that is not often discussed is the first commenter effect. That being whoever makes the first assumption about the content becomes the prevailing narrative for whoever follows.
It is then the follow-on of lazy NPCs seeking engagement that depend on the existing comments to have summarized the content negating the need to read it. The effect of which results in discussions of absolute fiction about what everyone has imagined the content to be.
We eagerly misinform ourselves!
The media's default position is to misinform. However, sadly most make zero effort to know anything beyond what serves either their interests or serves as a useful mechanism to further their engagement on their social media networks. Most are seeking to know and understand very little about the world as knowing more isn’t greatly useful to the attention-optimized algorithms of social media.
No compass through the dark exists without hope of reaching the other side and the belief that it matters …
Read the in-depth AI and societal introspection I wrote at the beginning of 2023 AI and the end to all things ...
Thanks for this piece. Without a doubt, among the more serious issues is this phenomenon of reading headlines and not content. It’s one of the reasons I quit social media. This article captures the problem perfectly. Perhaps worth mentioning that this behaviour was leveraged often by regime media during lockdowns and I’ve seen the strategy deployed often in scientific papers pushing regime agendas: the content doesn’t support the headline or title. Often conclusions don’t agree with the data presented. And what’s worse is that some readers who did read the content still couldn’t come to their own conclusions, but were misled. . . which was baffling.