Civil Service Exam Reviewer · Reading Comprehension · hard

Faster Than the Truth

A false story about a celebrity's death or a supposed new government rule can travel across social media in minutes, while the correction often arrives hours later and reaches far fewer people. Studies of online sharing have found that false news tends to spread faster than true news, in part because it is more surprising and more emotionally charged, qualities that make people want to pass it on. Fact-checkers work to slow this flow, but they face a structural disadvantage. A rumor needs only to be plausible; a correction must be accurate, sourced, and carefully worded, which takes time. Moreover, repeating a falsehood in order to debunk it can, under some conditions, make the false claim more familiar and therefore more believable to people who remember the claim but forget the correction. For this reason, some communication researchers recommend leading with the truth rather than the myth, explaining why the false claim is wrong, and giving people a simple alternative account to remember. Others emphasize "prebunking": teaching people in advance the common tricks of manipulation, such as fake experts and doctored images, so that they are less likely to be fooled in the first place.

Why can repeating a falsehood in a correction backfire?

  1. It angers the person who first spread it.
  2. It makes the correction too long to read.
  3. People may remember the claim while forgetting that it was corrected.
  4. It violates the rules of social media sites.

Answer

C. People may remember the claim while forgetting that it was corrected.

Solution

Repetition makes the claim "more familiar" to those who "remember the claim but forget the correction."

More Reading Comprehension questions

  1. What is the "structural disadvantage" that fact-checkers face?
  2. How does the author present Ostrom's findings?
  3. As used in the passage, "graduated penalties" most likely means
  4. Ostrom identified all of the following as conditions for success EXCEPT
  5. Ostrom's main contribution, as described in the passage, was
  6. According to the passage, Hardin concluded that shared resources must be
  7. As used in the passage, "the rosiest possible estimate" means the
  8. The final sentence argues that
  9. Besides honest optimism, why are estimates for public works often too low?
  10. Reference class forecasting begins by

All Reading Comprehension Reviewer questions