海角大神

The old saying 鈥渇orewarned is forearmed鈥� applies to the fight against fake news.

Putting a short, contextualizing message before spurious news stories can keep readers from accepting their claims, according to in the journal Global Challenges.

The paper鈥檚 authors 鈥� Anthony Leiserowitz and Seth Rosenthal at Yale University; Sander van der Linden at Churchill College, Cambridge, England; and Edward Maibach at George Mason University 鈥� wanted to investigate public understanding of the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change.

To this end, they divided a national sample of the American public into six different groups. Several of them read the , which claims to have received the signatures of more than 31,000 climate-skeptic scientists 鈥� and which Professor Leiserowitz calls a 鈥渃lassic piece of disinformation.鈥� Some of its signatories include the long-deceased Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls.

With the help of social media, sketchy information like this often gets taken as fact, circulates freely, and causes widespread damage before it鈥檚 debunked. The researchers say they鈥檝e found a solution, but it鈥檚 up to newsreaders and the media to adopt it.

鈥淵ou can inoculate against the effects of fake news,鈥� Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, tells 海角大神 in a phone interview. He and his colleagues gave one group just the petition. Another group instead viewed a pie chart showing that, in reality, agree that humans are driving climate change. A third group saw the pie chart, then read the bogus petition.

Two other groups read the petition after reading what Leiserowitz calls 鈥渋noculations:鈥� warnings that politically motivated groups try to use misleading tactics to raise doubts among the public about the scientific consensus, along with specific warnings about the Oregon Petition, followed by the pie chart. 鈥滻f you can give people a little pre-awareness that what they are likely to hear is bogus, you can inoculate against disinformation,鈥� he says.

The pie charts served that role. Leiserowitz explains that 鈥渨hen we give both messages鈥� 鈥� the petition and the pie chart 鈥� 鈥渟ide-by-side, they basically cancel each other out,鈥� and that perceptions of the 鈥渟cientific consensus鈥� did not change. But when readers read inoculation messages before the fake Oregon petition,聽their own estimate of the degree of scientific consensus still increased. The effect, the researchers noted, was similar 鈥渁cross political party affiliation.鈥�

This means that such 鈥渋noculations鈥� can help preserve the truth 鈥� and not just with scientific stories. Professor Leiserowitz suggested that similar warnings could also have helped rebut false claims 聽before they gained traction.聽

But these messages will only work if news organizations use them. Some news websites have doubled down on their commitment to fact-checking: The Washington Post, for instance, that checks the veracity of Mr. Trump鈥檚 tweets in real time.

But readers of other publications may be less receptive to these messages. Leiserowitz acknowledged that many news sites 鈥渂asically say, 鈥楧o not trust any information that comes from outside news sources....' That increasingly walls us off from one another.鈥�

Jack Zhou, an instructor in environmental politics at Duke University in Durham, N.C.,聽says some occupants of so-called 鈥渘ews bubbles鈥� may prefer to accept fake news as truth. 鈥淭he state of fragmented media may dull the potential practical impact of inoculation messages, particularly in terms of the audiences serviced by those media,鈥� Mr. Zhou, who has researched the identity politics of climate change, tells the Monitor in an email.

After all, sites with fake news are only catering to their audiences. Paul Levinson, a communications professor at Fordham University in New York, told the Monitor in December that, 鈥淭hese bubbles have not been imposed upon the public 鈥� it was what the people want. As long as social media continues to provide a very easy forum for these news bubbles ... it is not going to stop.鈥� [Editor's note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Mr. Levinson's first name.]

Social-media giant Facebook recognizes this as a problem. After chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg initially denied that Facebook鈥檚 carrying fake news was harming public discourse, the company announced .

The campaign was announced in mid-December, before the inoculation paper was published. But it also fights fake news by putting it in context. Facebook has partnered with online fact-checking services to spot dubious links. TechCrunch reports that, when they find one, Facebook will "show posts of those links lower in the News Feed. It will also attach a warning label noting 'Disputed by [one or more of the fact checkers]' with a link to the debunking post on News Feed stories and in the status composer if users are about to share a dubious link."

The same article reported that 44 percent聽of US adults get news from Facebook. The study of inoculation messages released Monday suggests that its plan to flag and debunk fake news could keep those users from accepting it 鈥� if they click at all after seeing a warning label.聽

That, in turn, could benefit civic discourse.聽Without a broadly accepted set of facts, Professor Leiserowitz explains, 鈥渋t gets harder and harder to have rational conversations.鈥�