5 Quotes by Nathan Bomey

Social media has given us the ability to twist the facts on a sweeping scale, transforming us into our own personal publicists and political spin doctors while provoking deep-seated misunderstanding and interpersonal division.

All you have to do is fool Google – because if you can fool Google, you can fool everybody,” said Wellesley College computer scientist Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, who has researched the spread of online rumors.

Stories focused purely on what side was winning represented 42 percent of the coverage. Coverage of policy issues took up a paltry 10 percent, while stories focused on leadership and experience accounted for only 3 percent.

We have entire professions devoted, at least to some degree, to spinning the facts. Public relations. Marketing. Lobbying. Law. Politics. People in those fields are paid to present a filtered version of the truth to their target audiences.

64 percent of people said in 2017 that they trust search engines as a source for general news and information, marking the medium’s fourth consecutive increase, according to global public relations firm Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey. That’s higher than the percentage of people who trust traditional news media, digital news media, and social media, according to the study. 7.