bonifartius 𒂼𒄄 @bonifartius@social.cleverlibre.org

Highlights from a 2023 paper by the clown at MIT who was recently caught scraping a bunch of fediverse instances:

>The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions.

>[V]aluing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment, whereas endorsement of individual responsibility over government support was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries.

>Finally, we find a robust positive association between truth discernment and COVID-19 vaccination intentions [...] We also find a weaker—but still pronounced and fairly consistently signed—positive association between truth discernment and the extent to which participants believe that others will get vaccinated (that is, their perception of the descriptive norm regarding vaccination).

>Although average levels of belief in falsehoods did vary substantially across countries, we found consistent evidence that analytic thinking, accuracy motivations and support for democracy were associated with a greater ability to discern truth from falsehood, as well as fairly consistent evidence that endorsement of individual responsibility over government support and belief in God were associated with worse truth discernment. These regularities emphasize the joint importance of cognitive and social factors, and suggest that a common psychology may underlie susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation across cultural contexts. They also help identify individuals who are most at risk of falling prey to misinformation, and thus would benefit most from anti-misinformation interventions.

https://techhub.social/@Drand/110628591264383357

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01641-6.pdf

Whether or not the so-called researchers realize it, their definition of "misinformation" is merely anything that contradicts the official opinion of the US government and its associated institutions; these "researchers" are paid by those institutions to act as censors and propagandists using high-tech methods of psychology and data science. Try to guess who the paper says are "most susceptible to misinformation" before you read it, and you'll probably be spot-on--the profile matches most conservatives and libertarians, and it's no surprise, either, because the paper seems to test for skepticism about covid vaccination. In effect they basically conducted a public opinion poll, calling one opinion "misinformation", and recommending that people who support said opinion be subjected to "anti-misinformation interventions". The foregone conclusion is that God-fearing individualists are victims of their own belief system and must have their opinions corrected or massaged by powerful institutions--after all, these people need help--their backwards viewpoints are a result of malicious propaganda. The evidence for this thesis is astounding, indicated by uncanny p-values of less than 0.001. It seems they even realized that there's a common "psychological profile" behind victims of disinformation, which sounds scary until you realize that it boils down into political beliefs, something any capable person can readily perceive.

At the end of the day this is a million-dollar act of institutional fellatio, a way to launder opinions and justify even more censorship. They hate people like us and they can't stand it when we're allowed to say what we want. The fact that they have to go to these lengths only proves that their power is weakening. Happy shitposting.

MIT employee David Rand @Drand has cajoled some retard who is paying $80,000/yr for a piece of paper to scrape fediverse sites so David can do nothing and put his name on some fucking "scientific" paper.

I have zero interest in enabling some high-horsed retard who does "research on #misinformation #fakenews & #polarization at MIT".

Requests from his IP now return:

{"error": "fuck off you list-making loser Nazi cunt"}

RT: https://nya.social/notes/818c3d1bdb3e20788eb08e25

Going down!

Burger King airlift away!

@julia @natalie

Do fedi servers have the ability to blackhole an IP? Instead of just block?

Literally just 302 to a special server who's entire reason for being is to hold the port open and sometimes give wait responses until the requester times out.

It's a great way of tying up someone's server.

You can also 302 to fake data too. If you think the researcher is being a complete pig. Poison their data with pure garbage.