When You Won't Change Your Mind
Humans are tribal thinkers. Our minds aren't wired to get to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That's not to say...
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JUSTIN P. MCBRAYER
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Justin McBrayer
- Jan 7, 2022
- 4 min
Internet + Group Polarization = Social Disfunction
On the one year anniversary of the Capitol riots in Washington, DC, there are lots of armchair analysts offering explanations for how...
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Justin McBrayer
- Nov 15, 2021
- 3 min
Clickbait 101: How to Frame for Effect
News organizations are in the business of making money. And making money requires having an audience. That means everyone in the news...
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Justin McBrayer
- Apr 19, 2021
- 5 min
Social Media Censorship Fallout
Last fall, I noted that Facebook took the unprecedented step of censoring certain sorts of content on their site. Posts making false...
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Justin McBrayer
- Feb 23, 2021
- 6 min
The Theoretical Case for Liberal Bias in the News
Evidence for empirical claims comes in two sorts: data about a particular case and data for a general pattern. For example, suppose I...
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Justin McBrayer
- Jan 28, 2021
- 4 min
How Left-Leaning Framing can Bias the News
Nearly everyone concedes that many corporate news organizations are biased towards the political left. It’s beyond argument that places...
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Justin McBrayer
- Jan 20, 2021
- 2 min
The Capitol Riot wasn't a Violence Problem. It was a Fake News Problem.
For the last two weeks, Americans have been wrestling with the implications of the mob attack on the Capitol that left several dead. ...
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Justin McBrayer
- Dec 22, 2020
- 5 min
Why Fact-Checking Fails
[note: this is an expanded version of an article that originally appeared in the Durango Herald on 12/21/20] We face a fake news epidemic...
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Justin McBrayer
- Nov 18, 2020
- 3 min
Big Questions, Little Questions, and Stolen Elections
It's going on week three after the 2020 election, and still the incumbent president has not conceded the race. The putative reason for...
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Justin McBrayer
- Oct 27, 2020
- 4 min
Social Media Censorship
Last week, Facebook announced that it would be banning any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust from its platform. Doing so...
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Justin McBrayer
- Oct 20, 2020
- 5 min
Against Offense
A surprising amount of space on social media and the daily news cycle concerns offense. Many of us are quick to point out when we are...
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