If you ever wondered how the media can convince you of ‘facts’ that have nothing to do with reality like ‘… is robbing the country’s treasury’ or ‘most… don’t work and they’re parasites’, a new American study has answers though they are depressing. There is no problem to get people to believe the most unrealistic lies as long as you repeat them enough. A media outlet with an agenda has many opportunities to repeat ‘facts’ over and over again whether they happened or not.
A research team from Yale University studied the phenomena of ‘Fake News” that picked up momentum in the US since the presidential elections. They collected news scoops that were clearly fabricated (‘Pope Franciscus decided to support Trump for president and sent a message to the press to that effect’) and they began to investigate the influence repeating this over and over would have. This wasn’t hard to do considering that this news was mainly disseminated through Facebook which many people shared. The result was that the more people saw the false headlines the more they tended to believe them no matter how absurd the content was.
If you don’t think this is depressing, here’s another finding: When people saw genuine headlines but not very often they tended to doubt them much more than a lie repeated many times. “Even one additional exposure to a ‘fact’ increases a person’s belief in its credibility whether at the time or even a week later,” write the researchers. “More than this, faith in the false news continues even after proven to be false by ‘myth busters’ or if the proof of falsehood disagrees with the readers’ political ideology.”
This tool was actually used by the infamous Nazi Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s officer of propaganda. Goebbels declared: Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”.
It seems human nature hasn’t really changed since then.