Fake news and emotions
- showmethereality
- Jan 10, 2021
- 2 min read
Man are irrational by nature
Fake news exploits the trait of the man being irrational. Our thoughts and emotions can be easily deceived. Fake news feeds our emotions whether it is politics, protests or campaign-based movements. They address readers’ emotions, touching events or topics that affect people on an individual level. There is usually a strong emphasis on storytelling, which are usually catchy. False information appears under exciting headlines and is usually easy to read.
Confirmation bias
It means that news that touches our emotions, thoughts and prove us right calm us down. Even though these articles are not factual, they still seem so to us.
Implicit bias
Humans are beings who tend to adapt to the man who shares their worldview. If we think that no one has been to the moon yet, we will probably follow Facebook feeds that profess the same.
About emotion infection
The most important goal of writing fake news is to produce content that people love and thereby share with each other. Emotional infection is the process by which information that creates a sense of emotional attachment can be easily shared among the masses. The greater the emotional attachment the more people share the information. Facebook conducted a study in which it manipulated the feeds of 689003 people with negative and positive emotions. It examined the extent to which the emotions of the people involved in the research changed from their pre-study emotions. The results highlighted that emotional states can be easily transmitted to other people through social media.
Image source:emolytics.com
Emotional calls
One of the abilities of these scams is to draw attention. Studies show that information spreads virally when it contains a high degree of moral emotion. Decisions are often driven by emotions so deep that they can be hard to identify. In decision making, people consult an emotion catalogue that consciously or unconsciously associates all the positive or negative tags belonging to a given context.
Our positive or negative feelings about people, things or ideas emerge much faster than our conscious thoughts. They appear long before we are even aware of them. The process takes only an astonishing 1/250 of a second. One exposure to the headlines of fake news can increase our subsequent disbelief in other headlines. Scrolling between social media feeds with emotionally provocative content can have an impact on the way the world is viewed.
If we repeat a lie often enough, it will become true after a while.
This is the first rule of propaganda. Although false news is attractive, in many cases they are same as our opinions, we must still be able to distinguish opinions from facts, false news from objective truth to not become emotionally infected.
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