Fake News, information that seems to be real information but is not, has become a scourge in our societies. In the last US presidential election, for example, 60% of Americans said they believed information that had turned out to be false later.
For Olivier Klein, it became necessary to explain why they are believed more easily than real information and especially what can be done so that they no longer have the same impact as they do currently.
For him, there are several reasons that explain this infatuation. First, the weak individual vigilance causes a superficial treatment of the information. Because of too much confidence in their own rationality, individuals do not think they are being fooled, unlike the others. Then, a lost confidence in the information given by a political system which is not more credible anymore causes the belief in the false information.
For him, there are three major problems in the digital age: the fact that everyone can become a source of information; the fact that verifying information is increasingly difficult; the fact that people are usually turning to the media that correspond to their beliefs.
He then advances skepticism neither too weak nor too high as the antidote to Fake News. He adds some techniques that help to reinforce skepticism and proposes ways of intervening to stop the phenomenon such as teaching the scientific method to the youngest people or institutional approaches with the creation of tools or committees that would check all circulating information.
These techniques and interventions tend to describe an idyllic society in which all individuals would have a very high level of education and the capacity to question the veracity of information. However, the author proposes some serious lines that deserve to be experienced to see their impacts on individuals beliefs when Fake News are at stake.
Klein, O. (2018). «Fake News» et crédulité: que peut-on faire?: Pistes d’analyse et d’intervention sur base de la recherche en psychologie sociale.
Words I have learned :
- Scourge: Fléau
- Infatuation: Engouement
- To turn out to be : S’avérer être
- To be fooled: Se faire avoir
- Digital age: L’ère du numérique