海角大神

Misinformation does more than arm dinner-table combatants with dubious talking points. With social media reach it bolsters false narratives, sways political constituencies, and influences policymakers on issues from abortion to climate science to vaccines.

Algorithms boost stories. And algorithms are about engagement, not accuracy. A blaring declaration can outplay a nuanced exploration.

So much for the wisdom of crowds, right?

That鈥檚 where it gets interesting. A new paper in Science Advances聽maintains that 鈥渓ayperson ratings鈥� of the objective truthfulness of news can be surprisingly accurate. Could they be scalable tools in fighting misinformation?

Assembled groups of lay readers studied were diverse, including in stated political leanings. Individuals made determinations independently.

The action was predictably chaotic, but 鈥渆ven if the ratings of individual laypeople are noisy and ineffective, aggregating their responses can lead to highly accurate crowd judgments,鈥� reads the paper. At 22 members, groups began outperforming the work of professional fact-checking sites.

鈥淥ur sense of what is happening is people are ... asking themselves, 鈥楬ow well does this line up with everything else I know?鈥欌�� David Rand, an MIT professor and lead researcher, .聽鈥淵ou don鈥檛 need all the people to know what鈥檚 up. By averaging the ratings, the noise cancels out and you get a much higher resolution signal.鈥澛�

That doesn鈥檛 mean shoving professionals aside. In the researchers鈥� view it鈥檚 just one more way for social platforms to foster a hierarchy of the credible.

鈥淵ou want to be assigning ... some score on this continuous slider of totally accurate to pants-on-fire false,鈥� Professor Rand tells Wired. 鈥淲hat I would do if I [were] them is, the worse it is the more you demote it.鈥�