How social media makes you believe

It is interesting how we are made to believe certain things. Things that did not take place, did not happen, untrue but merely repeated much to the extent that they "seem" real and since they are "spoken" and "shared" by many, thus they "must" be true.

We are humans and our interpretations of the world are very much intertwined with our own biases. Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses - (Wikipedia).

Now, let me explain how this confirmation bias plays deep into our minds via Facebook. When we read stories that we like on Facebook and we click "Like", Facebook's algorithm remembers and recognises the post as an interesting post. It will then display more news from the person that you have "Liked" previously. The same goes for news that you do not click "Like" on. The newsfeed from people that you don't click "Like" on will become lower in the hierarchy of stories to be displayed and after a while, it goes much down until you won't even notice it.

What happened actually is that, we are building our own belief bubble. By Liking things that only we like , we are giving instruction to Facebook, to only present us the news that we want to read. By blocking other views that is not in line with our own views. We are stopping polarised views to ours from entering our minds.

For example purposes, I will use the political scene in Malaysia to illustrate this. (I would like to believe that I am apolitical)

Now, during the 13th Malaysia General election, many were led to believe that Bangladeshis will be used to vote for the ruling Barisan Nasional. Postings in FB and Twitter like these below, which was making rounds before elections , made many people (including me) to be aware of Bangladeshis during election time.

Fact is, there were no verified cases of Bangladeshis who voted for the ruling Barisan Nasional.
Of course, there were even (secretly smuggled) e-mail trails of airlines ferrying thousands of Bangladeshis and other accompanying details that made this news seem so real.

Another issue close to this, is the "blackout" issue. Many Facebook/Twitter postings alleged after the elections that "blackouts" occurred at many polling stations when votes were counted.

Well, to date, I must have missed reading about an actual blackout that really happened on polling night, during the votes were counted. Following the brouhaha of the blackout, a protest was held. People from all over Malaysia came and gathered and voiced out their protests of the blackout. They changed their display profiles to black and wore black t shirts, in solidarity ,against the unfair blackouts that made certain parties win the elections and certain parties lose out.

Late 2013, there were also many noises on increase of highway tolls all over Malaysia. I was also angry that the toll charges were going to be increased. I too Tweeted and posted on Facebook about the toll hike.

Here are some other snippets from social media on increased toll.

Horror of all horrors, I later realised that all toll charges in Malaysia remained the same until the time this article was written!

 So, what actually happened?

Believing what I saw in social media, I too believe what people are saying and seeing the same messages appear numerous times , thinking that if many people says so, it must be true (argumentum ad populum).

In the movie World War Z, it was told that there was this Israel's Mossad's policy of the “10th Man”. For every potential threat/issues, one out of 10 men in the agency assigned to the case needs to take it seriously, no matter how far-fetched or ridiculous it may seem. Other countries (in the movie) did not take the threat of zombies seriously, except Israel. Israel, because of the "10th Man" policy , constructed a wall that protected their city from the zombies.

Maybe , in real and the cyber life, we need to reverse this. For anything that is likely to be true and is confirmed by many to be the truth, we may need to doubt it, at least once out of 10 times.