If you want to fight the spread of fake news, remember these two rules: Don’t blindly share stories that confirm your own biases, and just because a man claims he’s an expert on a given subject doesn’t mean what he says is true.
He could be an idiot, or worse, a liar.
Keep this in mind the next time you see a stranger on the Internet spreading a supposedly shocking discovery. There’s a lot to learn from things like this popular tweet from a guy allegedly named Thomas Binder:
1. Cardiologist alleges White Helmets faked photos because EEG pads are misplaced: 12,000 retweets
2. Cardiologist admits he was mistaken & the EEG pads are placed correctly: 22 retweets pic.twitter.com/RQ5HlagFXs— Olivia Solon (@oliviasolon) April 17, 2018
This Encyclopedia Brown wannabe claimed last weekend that United Nations officials had staged photos of victims of a reported gas attack in Syria.
“As a cardiologist I can say that these ECG electrodes are completely wrong positioned,” he said in a tweet suggesting English is not his strong suit (he also spells “photos” as “fotos”).
He adds, “They would not get any signal. This picture is faked!”
The same alleged cardiologist also believes shadowy operatives staged news reports in Syrian hospitals by putting dolls instead of real, live babies in incubators.
“Does anyone here believe that as a westerner I was not as completely disturbed as most people here when I had to realise that in fact ‘we’ are ISIS?” he asks. “In my universe self-criticism comes before criticising others. We were not always good but, for centuries, quite the opposite.”
Now, for the correction portion of this story.
“First I only saw the electrodes in the centre. On the phone I see they are placed quite correctly. I did not lie. I made a mistake! I apologise. Will the [white helmets] and others too?” Binder tweeted his initial claim had already gone viral.
His original note is still live. It has been shared by more than 13,000 social media users. His clarification has been shared by roughly 50 people.
Binder, who claims he is a “a neutral Swiss” and that his “‘ideology’ is humanism,” has not provided anything proving he is the expert he claims to be. But that hasn’t stopped literally thousands of social media users from sharing his alleged discoveries.
This brings us to a bigger point: One of the reasons these bogus stories go viral in the first place is because confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. If the claim comes from an “expert,” that’s just icing.
There has been a lot written in the last few months about the dangers posed by “fake news,” and how voters may have been misled by disinformation in 2016. Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that this sort of stuff takes hold precisely because it “sounds right” to the people sharing it. A person with no dog in the Syria fight wouldn’t uncritically share Binder’s claim. They’d ask for clarification or explanation. But the story sounded good, so 13,000 people hit that “re-tweet” button even though there was no real reason for them to believe anything Binder said.
“Fake news” is a problem, yes, and so are the people who produce it. But the bigger, arguably greater problem is that there’s a hungry and willing audience for this stuff.
