What makes false information so effective?
The reason what boosts the effectiveness of fake information is that data is delivered to the audience, which has certain attitudes for that kind of thing. So the "will to believe" makes the information effectively and that kind of thing are shared very easily. This makes social media so effective tool for sharing the faked information.
If there are many supporters for some information, that would increase the trust for the information. The people, who are following their leader in this kind of case are very aggressive, which would deny the will to resist or fix the errors in the faked news.
We are facing the situation, that the people who would not able to see or make large-scale things have the same chance to get the same sized audience with some other more well-known people. And the thing is that the trollers would choose their social media mates by choosing well-known people, and they hope to get very much contacts by using those people as the "gate".
Centers for social networks can be used as a tool in information operation
There is a game on the internet, which is known as the "Kevin Bacon" game (the Oracle of bacon (theoracleofbacon.com) (1). That game is created as the tool for mapping how many connections the actors have in Hollywood between each other by their movies. That game calculates, how many people are between two actors, and similar data can be collected from the politicians or rock stars.
And if some social media user has the president of some nation in their social media network, that allows getting very effective and followed persons as the fellows in social media. That game can be used for the base to create the algorithm, which calculates the number of social media mates. Those people, who are acting as the centers in their social network are good targets for the information operators or propagandists, who would want to ask those people to the fellows in their social network, and then that operator could start to deliver faked data to that network.
That's why people like Rock Stars are really good fellows for the net trollers. The audience chooses fellows, what have the same style opinions, what they have, and this would give sharing that kind of operation very big effect. And if other trollers would put more similar cases to that information flow, that thing increases extending the power of information.
What would vaccinate people against information operations? Should people just learn to ask "why"?
The thing that would give a great chance to resist the faked information is education. The educated person would not so easily follow their leaders and the first step for the criticism is the skills to get information from the sources, which are proven as trustable. And the second thing is to find out, how to use our brains.
If we always are following every word, what our leaders would tell, that thing makes us blind robots. And that is the reason, why we must practice our way to think about what is behind some words. Why somebody attacks against some minorities and that kind of thing? Why some people want to isolate people, who are different than they are to the ghettos. Is there some reason for that kind of thing? And if some people are trained in universities, are the only persons, whose education doesn't mean a thing?
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