457 research outputs found
How people decide what they want to know
Immense amounts of information are now accessible to people, including information that bears on their past, present and future. An important research challenge is to determine how people decide to seek or avoid information. Here we propose a framework of information-seeking that aims to integrate the diverse motives that drive information-seeking and its avoidance. Our framework rests on the idea that information can alter peopleâs action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways. The suggestion is that people assess these influences and integrate them into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. The theory offers a framework for characterizing and quantifying individual differences in information-seeking, which we hypothesize may also be diagnostic of mental health. We consider biases that can lead to both insufficient and excessive information-seeking. We also discuss how the framework can help government agencies to assess the welfare effects of mandatory information disclosure
The Politics of Social Filtering
Social filtering â the selective engagement with people, communication and other information as a result of the recommendations of others â has always taken place. However, the possibilities of the Internet combined with the growth of online social networking activities have enabled this process to become rapidly more extensive, easier and potentially problematic. This paper focuses on the analysis of the politics of social filtering through social network sites. It argues that what is needed is both a closer examination and evaluation of these processes and also the development of a framework through which to begin such an evaluation. There is also a second intent: to (re)assert the argument that any analysis necessarily needs to take into account and critique the development, implementation and use of technologies (this includes the software, algorithms and code)themselves as well as the people that build and use them
âFake newsâ is the invention of a liar: How false information circulates within the hybrid news system
Alarmed by the oversimplifications related to the âfake newsâ buzzword, researchers have started to unpack the concept, defining diverse types and forms of misleading news. Most of the existing works in the area consider crucial the intent of the content creator in order to differentiate among different types of problematic information. This article argues for a change of perspective that, by leveraging the conceptual framework of sociocybernetics, shifts from exclusive attention to creators of misleading information to a broader approach that focuses on propagators and, as a result, on the dynamics of the propagation processes. The analytical implications of this perspective are discussed at a micro level (criteria to judge the falsehood of news and to decide to spread it), at a meso level (four possible relations between individual judgements and decisions), and at a macro level (global circulation cascades). The authors apply this theoretical gaze to analyse âfake newsâ stories that challenge existing models
Reasoning with comparative moral judgements: an argument for Moral Bayesianism
The paper discusses the notion of reasoning with comparative moral judgements
(i.e judgements of the form âact a is morally superior to act bâ) from the point of view of several meta-ethical positions. Using a simple formal result, it is argued that only a version of moral cognitivism that is committed to the claim that moral beliefs come in degrees can give a normatively plausible account of such reasoning. Some implications of accepting such a version of moral cognitivism are discussed
Moral Framing and Ideological Bias of News
News outlets are a primary source for many people to learn what is going on
in the world. However, outlets with different political slants, when talking
about the same news story, usually emphasize various aspects and choose their
language framing differently. This framing implicitly shows their biases and
also affects the reader's opinion and understanding. Therefore, understanding
the framing in the news stories is fundamental for realizing what kind of view
the writer is conveying with each news story. In this paper, we describe
methods for characterizing moral frames in the news. We capture the frames
based on the Moral Foundation Theory. This theory is a psychological concept
which explains how every kind of morality and opinion can be summarized and
presented with five main dimensions. We propose an unsupervised method that
extracts the framing Bias and the framing Intensity without any external
framing annotations provided. We validate the performance on an annotated
twitter dataset and then use it to quantify the framing bias and partisanship
of news
Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom
We assess whether and how accidental exposure to political information on social
media contributes to citizens\u2019 online political participation in comparative perspective.
Based on three online surveys of samples representative of German, Italian, and British
Internet users in the aftermath of the 2014 European Parliament elections, we find that
accidental exposure to political information on social media is positively and significantly
correlated with online participation in all three countries, particularly so in Germany
where overall levels of participation were lower. We also find that interest in politics
moderates this relationship so that the correlation is stronger among the less interested
than among the highly interested. These findings suggest that inadvertent encounters
with political content on social media are likely to reduce the gap in online engagement
between citizens with high and low interest in politics, potentially broadening the range
of voices that make themselves heard
Incentivised Sterilisation: Lessons from India and for the Future
Family planning programmes in India have historically been target-driven and incentive-based with sterilisation seen as a key component of controlling population growth. This opinion paper uses India as the backcloth to examine the ethics of using incentive policy measures to promote and secure sterilisations within communities. Whilst we acknowledge that these measures have some value in reproductive health care, their use raises specific issues and wider concerns where the outcome is likely to be permanent and life changing for the acceptor
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