Vaccines cause autism, Obama doesn’t show his birth certificate because he is not American, Muslims cheered when the Twin towers fell, are all fake news propogated by Donald Trump and his cronies, and we all know them to be fake news. We are smart, we would never fall for them.

Photo: pixabay

The problem is that human beings are not that logical. We are biological creatures finally tuned by billions of years of evolution responding to the selection pressures found on Earth in nature. Now, we have slammed that against auto-mation and social media – our brains had no chance.

Social media enhances the echo chamber effect. If our group believes that Trump won because of Russian bots rather than Hilary Clinton being an out-of-touch, untrusted candidate, then we will believe that fact.

Confirmation bias builds on this effect. Human beings interpret new information to reinforce old information. If I think that vaccines might lead to autism and a neighbour tells me that their child was sick after vaccination then I’ll definitely think those scientific articles must have a hidden agenda.

Another issue is that intelligence has another flavour: thinking style. Research have identified ‘cognitive misers’, a thinking style that tends to rely on intution rather than analytical thinking, such thinkers can be very smart but highly susceptible to fake news. Analytical thinking seems a better shield than raw smarts.

During the 2016 election, Russian bots spread fake news to support Bernie Sanders targetting Democrats to create a more divided and unstable America - think about that!