Fake News - We Just Can't Help Ourselves

Our world appears commonplace to our eyes. Normal, everyday.

We look around the room and see lamps, tables, and sofas. Outside, trees and flowers and grass. But what we are perceiving is the end result of a long chain of miracles. Living cells, and molecules, atoms and electrons and subatomic particles making up matter which is nearly all empty space. Quarks and bosons and virtual particles which wink in and out of existence. The nature of our universe is very strange indeed.

But we sense and comprehend only the end result.

There is a theory that our universe consists only of energy and information. Energy is the raw stuff of gravity and heat and light. Information is the structure, or patterns, imposed on energy to create particles and crystals and the stuff of matter that we sense.

It was in this information-rich environment that life on Earth evolved.

Even the simplest bacterium, 4 billion years ago, could sense and navigate to nutrition-rich surroundings. The purpose of this activity was equally simple: to survive and reproduce. This is our heritage and the environment in which we, and all living things, evolved.

Information is fundamental to our reality. It is the reason that our big, human brains developed.

It is not surprising to learn, then, that we humans are addicted to information. In the savannah, a glint of red amongst the green leaves of a bush might mean edible berries. A flash of motion could be a lion preparing to charge. In modern aviation, the bearing and speed of the wind are fundamental measurements needed for a safe landing. The directions in your mother’s recipe box make the difference between a tasty meal and a smelly mess. Yes, information is fundamental.

With this in mind, let’s turn to news of a recent study performed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They found that with our big, information-processing human brains, we seem to prefer false news.

The researchers found that “fake news” spreads 70% faster on Twitter than true news. Further, “it also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories,” according to MIT. The scientists controlled for the presence of “bots,” automated purveyors of news, and found that effect was due to our behavior, not the Russians.

Although research is ongoing, there is no reason to doubt that the same effect will be seen on other social media platforms such as Facebook. We humans are just plain hooked on gossip.

What’s going on? Here are a few things to consider:

• False news tends to be different, unexpected. The truth is typically more mundane.
• Novel, or unexpected, information attracts our attention. Remember how our brains evolved on the savannah. A fresh bit of information could spell either opportunity or doom. We just can’t help ourselves to pay attention to it.
• As each person receives the information, they tend to pass it on if it is interesting to them. False news tends to be more surprising than truth and is hence much more likely to be propagated. (70% so, according to the study).

We all have had to deal with false or misleading information. A telephone call promising low, low rates if we sign up right now. A knock at the door, a house painter who happens to have leftover paint from a job “down the street” and will make you a real deal. An email requesting our banking credentials so that your “account can be verified.” We don’t often fall for it; our skepticism shields are up.

But somehow, when it comes to social media, we gullibly believe that a major airline is going to give away free first-class passage to the first 1,000 who apply. Not only are we sucked in, we share it with our friends so they can be conned too. Somehow, we haven’t yet figured out how to be more discerning and skeptical in the virtual world.

What to do? Perhaps, based on the research, when presented with novel information, we should assign a fairly high probability that it is false. Check it out, don’t be gullible.

And remember what your mother taught you many years ago: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Wise guidance for the virtual world.

Facebook and the Great Data Breach

Facebook is quickly approaching 2 billion users. Last year, Facebook pulled in over $40 billion in revenue and earned $16 billion in profit. That’s one heck of a lot of cute grandkid photos and crazy cat videos.

Their profit margin (40%) is the envy of nearly every American business, whose average net is 7.5%. This highly successful company pulls in $20 in annual revenue and earns a net profit of $8 for each and every user. While any one of us isn’t all that valuable to Facebook, 40 billion of us are enormously so.

That is why Facebook is very concerned that many users are considering deleting their accounts following an infamous user data leakage fiasco.

You may have heard of that fiasco, and you may be considering the deletion of your account; but hold on. Let’s understand what happened and how you might reach a compromise with your principles.

The latest news is that the personal information of 50 million Facebook users was used by a British political research firm, Cambridge Analytica. They had been hired by the Trump campaign to identify potential voters. Now before you rage into a high partisan dudgeon, please realize that this behavior is common to political campaigns. In fact, Barack Obama’s successful 2008 effort was strongly supported by data mining.

As reported by The Atlantic in 2009, “How Democrats Won the Data War in 2008,” the successful Obama campaign relied heavily on analysis of voter data.

“Get-out-the-vote operations mounted by the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party and progressive organizations mobilized more than one million dedicated volunteers on Election Day. But it was buttressed by a year-long, psychographic voter targeting and contact operation, the likes of which Democrats had never before participated in. In 2008, the principal repository of Democratic data was Catalist, a for-profit company that acted as the conductor for a data-driven symphony of more than 90 liberal groups, like the Service Employees Union -- and the DNC -- and the Obama campaign. The Catalist data was crunched by the Analyst Institute, a DC-based organization that was set up to perform rigorous experiments like these on progressive voter contact methods.”

Now that doesn’t let Cambridge Analytica off the hook. Here is what they did wrong.

The initial foray into the Facebook user base was by an application developer that offered a “personality quiz” to Facebook users, 270,000 of which accepted and allowed access to their personal data. But at that time in 2014, the Facebook programming interface allowed access not only to those 270,000 users data, but also to all of their friends. This is how the information of 50 million users was eventually recorded and analyzed, an average of 185 friends for each of the 270,000 agreeable users.

The key point is that the other 50 million users had not given their permission, only the base 270,000. Facebook, properly chagrined, have since changed their programming interface to require that each and every user must give permission before their data can be gathered by an application. They are dopey, but learning.

Here are a few points to ponder and some simple tactics you can employ to protect your personal information.

• 1.       Facebook is “free.”
• 2.       But nothing in the universe if free. This is assured by the laws of physics which cannot be repealed.
• 3.       If Facebook appears to be “free,” something is going on.
• 4.       And that is that you are not a customer of Facebook. You are its product.
• 5.       The customers of Facebook are companies running advertisements, tailored to your interests by using Facebook data.

Now tailored advertisements are not all bad. Your erstwhile columnist would much rather see an advertisement on skiing in Italy versus one extolling the virtues of womens’ hair conditioner. But the cost is that we must share some of our data.

Here is how you can share a minimal amount of data with Facebook, but enough to continue enjoying pictures of cute grandchildren and crazy cat videos for “free.”

• 1.       Never play a Facebook game
• 2.       Never take a Facebook quiz
• 3.       Never take a Facebook personality test
• 4.       Simply use Facebook to share photos and comments with friends and relatives.

All of this is relatively new. No one of us can be blamed for not being an expert. After all, our grandparents were still dealing with telegrams and expensive long distance phone calls.

Here is one timeless tactic that will always help. Be skeptical. Always.