Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

by Carl T. Bergstrom

Online, it’s the same story, only more so. Even mainstream outlets deliver news with a partisan slant. We find ourselves isolated in separate echo chambers. Publishers such as Breitbart News Network and The Other 98% go one step further, pushing what is known as hyperpartisan news. Their stories may be based in fact, but they are so strongly filtered through an ideological lens that they often include significant elements of untruth. Publishers churn out partisan and hyperpartisan content because it pays to do so. Social media favors highly partisan content. It is shared more than mainstream news, and once shared, it is more likely to be clicked on. Deepening the ideological divide has become a lucrative business. MIT professor Judith Donath has observed that even when people appear to be talking about other things, they’re often talking about themselves. Suppose I log on to Facebook and share a false—even absurd—story about how airplane contrails are endocrine-disrupting chemicals being sprayed as part of a liberal plot to lower the testosterone levels of America’s youth. I may not be as interested in having you believe my claims about contrails as I am in signaling my own political affiliations. Sharing an article like this signals that I belong to a group of people who believe in conspiracy theories and distrust the “liberal agenda” in America. And if that’s my aim, it doesn’t matter to me whether the story is true or false. I may not have read it, I may not care if you...