2018
March
12
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

March 12, 2018
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Fake news is a popular topic these days. Facebook is blamed for spreading it. Countries are weighing how to combat it. And politicians accuse others of creating it. But last week, several Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers released a study that led to one ironclad conclusion: Fake news exists because people on social media love it.

The fact is, governments and tech companies have actually done a fair bit to help credible sources. Yet “Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods,” notes one analysis of the study. This has nothing to do with foreign meddling or robotic algorithms. The research found that Twitter’s bots promoted true stories as much as they promoted false ones. But the false ones were wildly more successful.

Why? First, fake news can be much more clickable because it is, well, fake. But it also manipulates us, evoking surprise and disgust. 

What emotions does real news evoke? Sadness and trust, the study found. Trust is something we all can value more. We can start by not expecting news to conform to our worldviews. And, perhaps, sadness doesn’t need to be the first emotion we associate with real news. Maybe we can expect news to inspire and uplift, too. 

Now, here are our five stories for today, looking at an election centered on character, a country searching for its voice, and a criminal justice program built on a different perspective.  


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Koji Sasahara/AP
A woman walks past a screen showing President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Tokyo March 9. After a year of threats and diatribes, Mr. Trump and third-generation North Korean leader Mr. Kim have agreed to meet face-to-face for talks about the North’s nuclear program.
Han Zhao/The Christian Science Monitor
Donald Haynesworth takes a class at the School of Reentry at the Boston Pre-Release Center. The school is part of a pilot program to help reduce recidivism and support inmates with valuable skills as they transition into society. 'When you get certain amount of education, you want more,' says Mr. Haynesworth.

The Monitor's View

Courtesy of The Pritzker Architecture Prize/Vastushilpa Foundation via AP
This photo shows the Aranya low-cost housing project by Balkrishna Doshi in Indore, India, which accommodates over 80,000 people through a system of houses, courtyards and internal pathways. Doshi of India won the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest honor in the field, announced March 7.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Muhammad Hamed/Reuters
A schoolchild prepares to fly a kite at a United Nations-run school in Amman, Jordan, Mar. 12.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte and Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Please come back tomorrow when we examine what often seems an overlooked war in Afghanistan. Staff writer Scott Peterson offers a different view, talking to some of the half-million Afghans displaced last year alone.

More issues

2018
March
12
Monday
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