What Mark Twain (Maybe) Said About Fake News

“A lie travels around the world before the truth gets its boots on.” So said Mark Twain– at least that’s who usually gets the credit. But since it didn’t appear until nine years after Twain’s death, there is room for scepticism.

But no matter the author, there is solid scientific support for the principle.
Researchers at MIT (http://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308) , after studying millions of posts, had this to say: “We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude.”

That wasn’t very subtle, was it? So, let’s ask ourselves why untruth has an easier time of it than the truth.

I suspect that there are at least four factors.

First, we’re evolutionarily wired to prefer bad news, whether true or false. Over the course of a year, two cavemen were warned about a small lion. One always focused on the “small” part and went for a walk, the other always focused on the “lion” part and cowered in the cave. Guess who ultimately survived to contribute to the gene pool.

Second, we’re all born gossips. We love scandalous news and we can’t wait to pass it on– it makes us feel “in the know” and gives us status, however fleeting. Fact-checking just interferes with the fun.

Third, all of us are credulous in our daily lives, that is, we choose to accept, as solid fact, positions for which there is little or no evidentiary support. We’re prepared to fight over iPhone vs Android, Toyota vs Volkswagen, Conservative vs Liberal and Catholic vs Protestant, even though cogent evidence to support either side is scanty at best. (A useful tip: Beware anyone who says, “It’s a well-known fact.” It ain’t.)

But the fourth (and scariest) reason is that we no longer even try to moderate the first three factors. There was a time when you would not be considered educated without having read the great thinkers, studied formal logic and learned the essentials of critical thinking. In other words, becoming educated was learning how to think critically, not just receiving a data dump. Call me a curmudgeon (and you’d be correct) but in my view, the abandonment of these reflective and evaluative components of education is the social equivalent of failing to vaccinate our kids.

But this is more than academic– as professionals, we need to understand the world in which our clients live and how they deal with the information and advice we give them. If this is a concern for you, your team, or your profession, let’s talk.