New Study Explains: How the Media Influences the Public to Believe Lies
Fake news? The public tends to believe lies they encounter repeatedly, even if they are completely absurd and debunked by professionals.
(Photo: shutterstock)If you've ever wondered how the Israeli media managed to convince large segments of the public to believe myths like 'the ultra-Orthodox are robbing the state treasury' or 'most ultra-Orthodox men do not work' – a new American study has provided the disheartening answer over the weekend: there's no problem getting people to believe the most outrageous lies – as long as they are repeated over and over. And for a media with an agenda, there are, of course, plenty of opportunities to repeatedly circulate facts that never existed.
A research team from Yale University conducted the study to examine the phenomenon of 'fake news', which gained momentum worldwide since the presidential election campaign in the United States. They gathered a group of 'news' stories that were evidently fictional (like 'Pope Francis decided to support President Trump for the presidency and issued a press release about it') and then began examining the effect of repeated exposure to them, which wasn’t difficult given that these stories were circulated mainly on Facebook and were widely shared. The result: the more people saw the fake headline, the more they tended to believe it was a real report, no matter how absurd its content was.
If that finding wasn’t depressing enough, here’s another one: when people encountered a correct and logical headline but one they weren't familiar with, they were more skeptical of it than a false and absurd 'report' they had already seen multiple times.
"Even a single exposure increases trust in the truth of the story, both at that time and a week later," the researchers write. "Moreover, the belief in the truth of the fake stories in this case continues even after they have been exposed as false by fact-checkers, or when they do not align with the reader's political ideology."
The conclusions of this study were already known long ago by none other than the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, may his name be erased. "The more you repeat a lie," Goebbels once declared, "the more it will become truth." Human nature, it turns out, hasn't changed since then.
