This Fake News Article Went Viral, Despite All the Obvious Clues Proving It Was a Hoax

Speaking at a conference for math educators over the weekend, blogger Dan Meyer gave a brief yet eye-opening presentation on how one particular fake news article went viral.

What’s appalling in the example he uses is just how many clues there were for anyone who wanted to debunk the story… and yet the misinformation spread anyway.

The relevant portion begins at the 36:43 mark.

DanMeyerStats

The purpose of his speech was ostensibly to stress to teachers the importance of the question “How do you know?” since nearly every discipline has to deal with that. But it’s also an issue that skeptics face on a regular basis.

We’re in the business of convincing people to listen to reason, and to stop being so damn gullible, and to recognize legitimate news sources from fake ones. As Meyer shows, however, we have a long way to go.


"Most of the abuses being discussed happens during basic training (turning a civilian into a ..."

Atheists Urge Defense Secretary to End ..."
"Those solar eclipses were warnings about the Spaniards.Unfortunately Eclipses aren't very good warnings because you ..."

Anne Graham Lotz: God May Send ..."
"I believe that his point was that they probably believe that gays are abominations and ..."

Founders of Mormon Doomsday Cult Traded ..."

Browse Our Archives

Follow Us!


What Are Your Thoughts?leave a comment
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/12/06/fake-news-article-went-viral-despite-obvious-clues-proving-hoax/
www.patheos.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-05
86872
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:T4Z7GIVISUQH4QFOI445ZXGXVSLKU2Q5
<urn:uuid:00bdc838-af2d-4d71-95f8-24d6749e46ed>
2018-01-21T15:14:53Z
152.195.32.39
text/html
sha1:RTLQF4CPIPZKOKN6TWA4AL5ZAS356FPX
<urn:uuid:98c6357e-5326-4840-a610-c7ce2bca4b3c>
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/12/06/fake-news-article-went-viral-despite-obvious-clues-proving-hoax/
response
<urn:uuid:c7fd5d39-f40a-4644-92b6-bc811bc67bd1>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-181-213-23.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf