The truth is boring, complex, and nuanced, and is never correctly reported.

A few days ago, after a week of fairly baseless over-interpretation of some recent research, I commented in As is, though, it is simply more fake news.

From The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi1, Deb Roy , and Sinan Aral. I must admit to deep skepticism when I first saw the headlines to this research. True and false are astonishingly challenging epistemic and philosophical issues. The whole issue of fake news is essentially a political posturing issue with little relationship to truth.

I focused on a foundational flaw in the methodology that undermined any of the posited outcomes.

I have not seen any other pushback since then, i.e. the misreporting of the research continues. Until today. And the new bloggers are focusing more on the misinterpretation of scope. Tyler Cowen expresses skepticism of their research in Does fake news spread faster on Twitter? and makes some important points. Similarly with That Popular "Science" Article on False Tweets Isn't Really True
by Steve Sailer. I don't disagree with Sailer and Cowan that miscommunication of the actual scope is a real issue.

However, I think one of the more interesting additions to the discussion is from one of Cowen's commenters.

Arnold Layne March 18, 2018 at 10:32 am
Yep. A bunch of people sit down and make up crap, competing for clicks and shares, sometimes using A/B testing. The ones that make it up to the top get noticed and win the coveted label of “fake news,” and participate in the rumor cascade.

The rest perish, sad, unshared, and unclicked. Not part of the rumor cascade. This is how Buzfeed, Business Insider, and all the other clickbait factories on the web work, too.

The fake news from the MSM works differently. I don’t think it’s intentional. Reporters, when they find an “angle,” get tunnel vision and confirmation bias for the rest of their reporting on the story. The truth is boring, complex, and nuanced, and is never correctly reported. The result is that boring, nuanced, complex truth doesn’t make it to the paper, and all you get is stories with exciting findings that are poor approximations of the truth.

The insight is from the bottom paragraph. I.e. there are systemic incentives that drive the proliferation of cognitive pollution.

One of the original researchers focuses on the criticisms about scope and acknowledges that the media have misinterpreted the scope. He sets it out succinctly in this tweet.

Thanks to @jjaron for some clarifying comments to my first diagram. Here's a second one that fills in some more detail. The outer circles point to areas where we need further research! pic.twitter.com/KhJth1zFnp

— Deb Roy (@dkroy) March 15, 2018