| Abstract: | A global pandemic has transformed the world’s operation on politics, economics, transportation, and education; regardless of the point of view, all can agree that the extrinsic environmental effect and the intrinsic individual essence have all been impacted, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as the world confronts the COVID19 pandemic. To effectively minimize the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, people were forced to decrease face-to-face interaction. Subsequently, internet media has become the world’s main source of news intake and also the largest outlet for fake news. Especially under the impact of COVID-19, governments and organizations are withholding the new ‘right to speak', by riding on the different waves of emotions to infiltrate media channels with a high volume of information, or fake news at times, stirring uncertainty within the community. The way to distinguish truth from falsehood must originate from the cognitive perspective of news absorption.
In facing a high and fast inflow of information, our brain needs to handle different concepts and incomplete fragments simultaneously. During the stage of information processing, only a small amount of attention is allocated to the cause and effect; as a result, we form a general understanding of concepts that are high in volume but low in precision. The approach to information organization is wide and unfocused, and the lack of in-depth conceptual understanding makes discussion on proposition development difficult to execute. In addition, there has been an uptake in the threshold of information absorption, as visual stimulation has become the only medium to garner people’s attention. In a generation where pictures, videos, and audio replace words and texts, a new cognitive model has been established, where images are prioritized over texts. Accordingly, based on the new cognitive characteristics of information intake, two forms of media elements have emerged: a ‘dumbed down’ version of information and an ongoing repetition of messages that aims to fabricate validity. Based on the nature of simplicity and ease of understanding, these two forms of media have eased into the general public. Based on the history of infectious diseases, when public health gets threatened, fake news gets surfaced more frequently; COVID19 follows the same trend. Especially due to the rising anxiety of the pandemic, news volume has spread more widely than ever. Further, the standard for forwarding messages is no longer contingent on the degree of truth, but the level of popularity. The entry bar for social media encourages participation rather than precision, which further amplifies the speed and magnitude of the spread of fake news. As a result, our cognitive operation is constantly placed under a mode of ‘offense’, in combat against warfare of truth or false
Fake news is everywhere. As much as government institutions take immediate action to regulate, the spread of fake news is hard to constrain. The most fundamental solution should start with one’s cognitive awareness, to enhance one’s digital literacy through the cultivation of metacognition, to avoid becoming a spreader of false information to one’s awareness. Metacognition is an understanding of one’s thought process and an ability to take on thought management and development. Before forwarding a message, one must understand one’s degree of emotion - instead of reacting immediately, one can think through the logic and credibility of the message, evaluate one’s ideology apart from the given domain, evaluate whether the initial reaction was impacted by emotion and ideology, and then assess the possible outcome and impact of sharing that message. Metacognition training offers a bystander point of view that oversees one’s thought process, which helps lessen cognitive biases and reduce the tendency of selective understanding of information. Research has shown that mandating information spreaders to evaluate the credibility of a message via metacognition can prompt spreaders to critique the message itself, increasing their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. Similar to virus prevention, suppression of the spread of fake news fulfills the role of global citizenship - it is a shared responsibility among us. |
