True or false? Organic or synthetic?

I did quite well considering that the grammar used made some of the questions unclear as it was difficult to tell precisely what they were getting at - or maybe I'm just thick.

My posts are out of synch again . I was referring to your earlier post about peer review, Elegran.

I suppose if they printed the answers they would leak out and invalidate the tests. I would like to know too though.

That's pretty much what I said, Elegran, except that it only works for academic study. Some things can be verified in other ways. For me, it is the ability to check something out that makes me believe it.

Curlywhirly, I am not sure that if I sat the test again I would get the same score for the bot section - some of my answers were probably guesses.

There is also the point that the more that is published online about how to distinguish info from misinfo, and human-speak from computerese, the more feedback the misinformers and bot-programmers have about how to avoid bamboozling us.

Sorry, one of the two I got wrong - I wish we had seen more detail about our successes and failures.

Curlywhirly Computers use the grammar and sentence structure that have been programmed into them, which are correct usage. Departures from correct usage are more likely to be done by humans. One of the examples in the questionnaire had a very short and dramatic sentence - I labelled that as humanly written (though I have no idea whether that was right, or whether it was the one in eleven that I got wrong.) It just didn't seem computery.

Yes, the language used is very much under the control of a clever marketer, though quite a lot of the conspiracy theories seem to be passed on by people who are not all that clever about actually thinking about the cause they are espousing. The best defence against false information is to check where the idea came from to start with, and find out whether the originator is to be believed by reading the peer reviews of the studies and the data quoted.

I scored 11 out of 11 for misinformation and 6 out of 11 for the bots. Must say discerning which comments were computer generated was just a guessing game for me! I had absolutely no idea.

I scored 11 out of 11 for misinformation, and 8 out of 11 for the bots.

I thought it was a lot ore difficult than expected. I have to be able to spot misinformation in my work, so would have been disappointed with a low score, but bots are very 'clever', and people's communication skills are very variable, so I don't think it's easy to spot them.

I filled the box in, and said that I think about how I would verify information, and if I realised I couldn't (as in it was impossible regardless of whether I had the means at my own disposal) then I assumed it was false. Emotive language is not a signifier of misinformation, or the other way round. Someone with sinister intent can very easily mimic cool or passionate language to hide their intent - it's much less about style than about whether it can be verified.

I did, mostly that real information is usually clear and coolly presented, while misinformation tends use loaded words to appeal to the emotions of the reader and generate an immediate and unconsidered response. Lots of rhetoric like "It is disgusting that . . " or, on the other hand, references to people with professional-sounding qualifications who have confirmed the "facts" given, but if you investigate further they turn out to know very little about the subject, or to have extreme bees in their bonnets.

11 out of 11 (imo, bull-shit is easy to recognise). 8 out of 11- 73 %. I wish they’d revealed which was which re. real people or computer. Did everyone fill in why they picked what they picked re. the accurate info/mis-info?

91 and 91 but it wasn't a very interesting survey. I can't remember exactly but there were a couple of oddities in the information stuff - one was where we aren't certain I think.

91% and 73%

100% for misinformation, but it was my field of expertise!
30% for computer speak !!!

It seems that so far I am alone in thinking that there is an ulterior reason behind the questionnaire. I wouldn’t take it at face value. Possibly someone, somewhere, is gathering data about attitudes to vaccinations or gullibility or something similar.

70% Misinformation
73% Real people.

I was in the 80% range for misinformation but did much less well on computer generated.

Made me think that more information should be available to help people understand how this all works and how to distinguish.

7/11 for misinformation
3/11 for real people
Oh dear ; it has been a long day.

73% for misinformation
55% for computer generated...
Mind you, I did it whilst watching Question Time. ?

I was 11/11, just as I hoped and 8/11, just as I suspected!

91% for misinformation

36% for computer generated, not so good…..

I got 64% but then I am supping a rather large G and T.
Cheers. ?

They are called bots.

11/11 and 6/11, I’m ok with that.

Maybe those spam posts that are meant to look as though they are from real posters, praising something that cured some medical condition overnight that other treatments had had no effect on, and adding a link to the website where (surprise surprise) it can be bought? Someone can set up a site to search for mentions of key words in social media sites like GN and automatically join up and post spam like that. They usually have weird usernames that are just random letters and numbers.