MEPX
Chapter 9 of 10All chapters
  1. 1What it actually is
  2. 2Reading a claim
  3. 3Weighing evidence
  4. 4Judging sources
  5. 5Your own thumb on the scale
  6. 6Claims with numbers
  7. 7Cause and effect
  8. 8Persuasion techniques
  9. 9Information online
  10. 10Building the habit

Chapter 9 of 10

Information online

Volume, virality and generated text.

What spreads

Content spreads because it provokes, not because it is accurate. The most shared version of a story is usually the least qualified one.

  • Read past the headline: it was written to be clicked, often by someone else.
  • Check the date. Old stories recirculate as new ones constantly.

Generated content

Text, images, audio and video are now cheap to fabricate and fluent by default. Confidence and polish have stopped being signals of reliability, which raises the value of provenance.