My problem with the test is that I’m not sure it’s really testing what it purports to be testing. It says that it’s testing your ability to discern misinformation from looking at titles, but I think what it’s really testing is your ability to differentiate human written titles and AI generated titles. AI generated titles could be truthful and human written titles could be utter bullshit and without checking the credibility of the source or reading the article, you’re not necessarily going to know which is which unless you already know something about the topic.
That said this is an interesting experiment that I predict will not have the same results when LLMs become more advanced.
That was a poorly constructed test. The fake headlines were far too easy to identify since they really didn’t play into any of the ongoing, large disinformation campaigns.
I would say that you have to rely on a network of trust if you can’t distinguish yourself. This may be dangerous if the people you rely on are not trustworthy, but this is also a reality check.
YouGov is a garbage institution. They were founded by some uber conservatives in England, operate out of England, meddle in American politics, and have a propensity for sneakily skewing results of surveys. I recall one clickbait headline of theirs about most US citizens support banning abortion and they had surveyed a very small set of people and from conservative, religious areas.
I believe you but you gotta show some receipts,. I see that there is some people that don’t like them. 538 is pretty conservative and does an okay job. It seems to be a legit questionnaire even if they use the info for evil.
Edit: I should add that the test is from Cambridge too.
I had a glance and didn’t see anything but I’m not investigative reporter and it’s hard to tell without spending a lot of time on it. One of the founders ran as a conservative and is now on the board. It’s probably in their interest (they are public/in stock market) to conduct good surveys, but to also generate data which would be of interest to conservative leaning organizations. That’s my guess. Their articles may be misleading though, since those would be more promotional/marketing material of the data they want to sell.
Took the 20 question version and got 20/20. I think it was an okay way to get a sense on fake news, but at the same time there have been more conspiracy theories peddled by media from all different political leanings over the past 5-10 years. Even a legitimately published headline can be deceiving.
We're living in a time when The Onion is indistinguishable from actual news and comedians are doing better reporting than news networks. I'm not surprised people scored poorly on this test.
today.yougov.com
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