Highly anticipated events make even experts vulnerable to sophisticated fakes

Evidence

A few hours later I wanted to show the video to a friend and after some extensive googling I discovered that in fact the footage was fake – a very sophisticated fake. The video had combined real footage from another Mars rover mission with real audio from a seismic instrument on NASA’s robotic lander InSight. So, although the footage and Martian wind sounds were real, they weren’t live, and they didn’t come from the microphone of the Perseverance. I felt hoodwinked. But I wasn’t the only one; the video was viewed over 25 million times and shared by many academics, journalists and celebrities, including Stephen King. The video’s creators had taken explicit advantage of the fact that people were anticipating the footage: our brains had expectations of what we wanted to see. In short, if you think you’re immune to fake news, think again. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to confirmation-bias and expectation literature; also to reading about why plausibility rather than evidence drives belief acceptance. — connects to: Even misinformation experts fall for convincing fake news footage — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 45
• CANDY: The Mars Perseverance hoax fooling Stephen King and millions of academics is an instantly shareable anecdote about fake news.