Truth Confirmation Bias and Propaganda

Before this class, I would have told you I was pretty good at spotting bias in other people. The confirmation bias videos made me realize the person I should have been watching was me. Somewhere in the middle of those clips, I caught myself doing exactly what they described: gravitating toward information that already agreed with what I believed and brushing past everything else.

I know it can sound egotistical to say this, but I am much more aware of it now. I haven't fixed it completely, and I doubt anyone does. What has changed is that I notice the pull. When I feel that quick satisfaction of seeing something that confirms my opinion, I now treat it as a signal to slow down, not a reason to keep scrolling. For the most part, I have learned not to only listen to the content that tells me what I want to hear.

The propaganda material changed how I read the world around me, especially in three areas. Politics is the obvious one, since so much of it is built to trigger a reaction before anyone has time to think. Sports gambling is another, and I see the media pushing it so much right now.  Before anyone has time to think, it shows someone winning a huge parlay, which causes more and more people to gamble (even when the gambling result is fake). The third is trending news, where the version that spreads fastest is rarely the most complete one. Working in sports media, I know how quickly a narrative can take over once enough people repeat it.

My biggest takeaway is that being skeptical doesn't mean distrusting everything. It means asking who benefits from me believing something, and whether I would question it if it said the opposite.

AI use: I used Claude to help organize my notes and edit this post. The reflections are my own.

Comments

  1. williams.dan76October 6, 2026 at 7:46 AM

    Thanks, Daniel, great response to confirmation bias and propaganda. It's impossible to erase all of our biases, but it's helpful to remind ourselves that we are biased and then try to compensate. Gambling today scars me for a lot of reasons, and I almost cannot stand to listen to the talking heads on the radio talking about sports. It's all about the odds. but the scariest thing today is how AI algorithms are shaping our brains. 99% of the time AI will respond to our searches with what it thinks we want, and thus we are starting to live in endless echo chambers.

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