How Covid changed the way Britain thinks
How Covid changed the way Britain thinks The Guardian
Read More
Conspiracy Resource
Conspiracy news & views from all angles, up-to-the-minute and uncensored
Archives
The big idea: do we worry too much about misinformation?
Seeing falsehoods everywhere is as damaging as believing too much. Our focus should be on helping people interpret information better
On 30 October 1938, a US radio station broadcast a dramatisation of HG Wells’s apocalyptic novel The War of the Worlds. Some listeners, so we’re told, failed to realise what they had tuned into; reports soon emerged of panicked audiences who had mistaken it for a news bulletin. A subsequent academic study estimated that more than a million people believed they were experiencing an actual Martian invasion.
A startling example of how easily misinformation can take hold, perhaps. But the story is not all it appears to be. Despite oft-repeated claims, the mass panic almost certainly didn’t happen. In national radio audience surveys, only 2% reported listening to anything resembling The War of the Worlds at the time of the broadcast. Those who did seemed to be aware that it was fiction. Many referred to “the play” or its narrator Orson Welles, with no mention of a news broadcast. It turned out that the academic analysis had misinterpreted listener accounts of being frightened by the drama as panic about a real-life invasion.
Read More
The world is listening to Russia again. From the ruins of Ukraine, it makes me want to scream | Oleksandr Mykhed
The massacre in Bucha, the mass graves in Izium – it is as if these atrocities never happened. Now the truth is being taken out and shot
Orders and statements from the new US president come at us daily now, with unremitting speed, and international politics is reduced to an endless series of justifications and denials of unfounded accusations.
It’s hard to believe, but Ukrainian activists have had to write explainers for a global audience, reminding them who the true dictator is, that it was not Ukraine that started the war with Russia and that we are actually just trying to defend what is ours. And, you know, to survive a little bit.
Read More