From Pine View Farm

The Misinformation Superhighway 0

After drawing a distinction between misinformation and disinformation, Aditi Subramaniam offers some reasons as to why we are susceptible to misinformation (think the clickbait headlines that Snopes is so fond of debunking) and some techniques for dealing with it.

She starts by telling a story of her own trip down the rabbit hole of a clickbait headline (follow the link below to see what she discovered about said headline and its tenuous connection to facts, as well as for some hints to help avoid falling down your own rabbit holes). Here’s a bit of her article.

The headline also illustrates the importance of wording in communication. In linguistics, the term “implicature” describes what a sentence is used to mean, or what it implies, rather than what it says literally. Scheming politicians, marketing professionals, lawyers, and even con men of various kinds use implicature and “weasel wording” to say something while meaning something else – allowing them to shirk responsibility for their words.

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