News aggregators strip away the visual and contextual cues that once signaled reliability

Evidence

Suppose you brought home a copy of the National Enquirer and the New York Times and cut out the news stories with scissors. Then you placed them side by side in a collage, scanned them into an electronic format, and corrected the font so that you couldn’t immediately tell which one was which. How would you know at a glance which stories were true? But this is exactly how our news is presented to us now on news aggregator websites like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. You might say that you’d look at the source of the story, but do you know which sources are reliable? If you see the New York Times you might be more inclined to trust it. But what if it says InfoWars? Or Newsmax? Or ABCNews.com.co? — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 193

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lofland’s point that appearance and other surface cues once stabilized urban judgment of strangers — aggregators remove exactly those categorical cues. — connects to: Middle-schoolers judge news credibility by whether it includes a picture — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 49; Media juxtaposition conceals the dialectical links between seemingly unrelated events — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 797; Fake news softens trust in sources before status-based propaganda replaces persuasion — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 229 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Fake news softens trust in sources before status-based propaganda replaces persuasion #expands (0.78) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 229
• Media juxtaposition conceals the dialectical links between seemingly unrelated events #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 797
• Social media changed misinformation’s speed, reach, and social context #expands (0.72) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 314