Your podcast discovery platform
Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Get Real: Truth Is Humans, Not Robots, Love Fake News
Albert Camus called falsehood a ‘beautiful twilight’ that enhances every object, unlike truth, which blinds. Who knew it would be the most poetic analysis of fake news in the 21st century?!
A massive, first-of-its-kind MIT study has found that on social media (Twitter actually), falsehood triumphs truth by a large margin. But since it is a longitudinal study, it has deep implications for every other social network. As despairing as it sounds, the truth is fake news and rumours reach more people, spread faster and penetrate deeper. The study, published in Science, analysed over 126,000 stories tweeted by three million users over a period of 10 years. Soroush Vosoughi, MIT’s data scientist and lead of the study, says it is not because of bots but because of human nature itself.
This has prompted a flurry of discussions on how to address the “underlying pathologies” that this spread of fake news indicates, and better still, how to create an ecosystem that supports and promotes truth.
Both easier said than done. The study strongly suggests that Twitter users, in fact, prefer sharing fake news — which is why a false story is much more likely to go viral than a true one. Curiously, bots on Twitter spread as many fake stories as they did true ones. Hence, the blame cannot be laid at the robots’ feet.
The researchers believe we ought to really blame evolution and the emotional state of human beings. The fake news study findings correspond with similar results across a variety of disciplines such as psychology and communication. One of the political scientists quoted in the article talks about the key takeaway from these findings — content that arouses strong emotions spreads faster and deeper.
And therein lies the crux of the matter.
