But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place. “At the mass level, greater partisan divisions in social identity are generating intense hostility toward opposition partisans,” which has “seemingly increased the political system’s vulnerability to partisan misinformation,” Nyhan wrote in an earlier paper. The second driver of the misinformation era is the emergence of high-profile political figures who encourage their followers to go ahead and indulge their desire for identity-affirming misinformation. After all, an atmosphere of all-out political conflict often benefits those leaders, at least in the short term, by rallying people behind them. As people get more prone to misinformation, opportunists and charlatans are also getting better at exploiting this.

Source: bd News24 May 08, 2021 07:41 UTC