2021-05-10

Cool

email from Etsy.com, the day after Mother's Day and many promotional emails about that:

We understand that not everyone is interested in celebrating Father’s Day. So we want to give you the chance to opt out of receiving Father’s Day messaging in emails from Etsy.
Canadian Fascists Arrest Pastor for “Illegal” Church Service
Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment | Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

We identified N=2,000 users who shared false political news on Twitter, and replied to their false tweets with links to fact-checking websites. We find causal evidence that being corrected decreases the quality, and increases the partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets (but has no significant effect on primary tweets). This suggests that being publicly corrected by another user shifts one's attention away from accuracy - presenting an important challenge for social correction approaches.
- "false political news" and "fact checking websites" are small band aids over large areas of contention that could alter the conclusions here. Who decides which politics are wrong? If that isn't "every individual who is faced with the choice, on their own" then is it still politics, or is it more herd management?