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Social media stirring up mystery of NJ drones

Many posts amplify fears and narratives

By: Gene Myers
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... North Jersey has been on edge as mysterious drones reportedly fill the skies - and our imaginations and social media feeds.
..... With purported sightings from Wyckoff to Wantage, and the Raritan River to Rockaway Township, authorities have felt compelled to issue both warnings and public assurances in recent days.
..... Where's the frenzy coming from? Many North Jersey residents are looking at the sky bad seeing lights that sincerely unnerve them. but psychologists and social scientists say there are other factors that have to be taken into account: our human tendencies to follow a crowd and social media's ability to amplify fears and narratives.
..... As authorities scramble to identify the source, if any, of the objects, the drone story is reverberating in an era of declining trust in institutions and a desire for security in uncertain times.
..... "It is making people anxious," said Richard Waldron, a Closter-based psychologist. "It's kind of like a Peeping Tom, and it gets everybody;s vigilance up - they because hypervigilent to it."
..... Reports of unidentified drones have spread on social media since mid November. [2024] What began in Morris County as a few scattered sightings quickly became a viral sensation, prompting authorities at Picatinny Arsenal, a military research facility in Rockaway and Jefferson townships, to issue warnings against flying drones over its airspace.
..... The FBI said last week [12/05/2024] that it was investigating the drone reports as well as what it described as a "possible fixed-wing aircraft" along the Raritan River whose branches flow near the military arsenal and President-elect Donald Trump's golf course.
..... But the reports have spread well beyond those potential targets to small towns across New Jersey. Just check your local Facebook group.
..... In a study by scientists at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken in 2009, near the dawn of the social-media era, researchers found that people's perceptions of Online information can be swayed by its apparent popularity.
..... The research by the school's center for Decision Technologies made use of the Online publishing platform Digg.com . By manipulating the number of "up-votes" a post had, the scientists found they could increase the number of rel-life readers who rated articles positively. It worked regardless of the nature of the content, the authors said in "2,377 People Like this Article: The Influence of Others' Decisions on Yours."
..... The popularity of a narrative becomes its own validation and can transform anecdotal accounts into ironclad evidence, said researchers Yasuaki Sakamoto, Jing Ma and Jefferey Nickerson. "Al thought people may not be explicitly processing the information about others' choices, they may be unconscionably influenced by it," they wrote.
.... It's not a stretch to imagine that the more people see posts about drones flooding the skies, the more likely they are to interpret inconsistent information - maybe those lights are just a plane? - as proof of a trending phenomenon.
..... Still, social media doesn't have to be a negative influence. It can connect us to knowledgeable sources.

Civil Air Patrol weighs in

..... In Rockaway township, for example, Chris Thomas took to Facebook recently to educate fellow Morris County residents on the difference between drones and planes, which can be admittedly difficult to distinguish in the dark skies that accompany's a new moon.
..... Put simply, drones typically have two front lights on one color and two back lights of another, which flash together. airplanes, on the other hand, have distinct red and green lights on either wing and white strobes that are absent on drones.
..... "People see strobe lights in the sky and often assume it's a drone, but 99% of the time, it's an airplane," Thomas said.
..... But Thomas, who serves as an aerospace education officer in the U.S. Civil air Patrol and is a certified drone pilot, admits the discussion isn't so cut and dried these days.
..... Just ask his wife, who said she has seen one of the mysterious drones.
..... "We are in a debate over whether a blinking light in the sky was a drone or another type of aircraft," Thomas said. "But I'm very skeptical as to the possibility of a drone anywhere around us."
..... Though he may be a skeptic, quick, blurry videos posted Online will continue to gain traction for a while because there's something deeper going on, said Waldron, the Closter psychologist.

America has communal PTSD

..... "If you go back for a bunch of years, everybody thought this country, up until 9/11, was relatively safe. That got shattered," Waldron said. The September 11 {2001} terrorist attacks were followed by the financial crisis, then COVID and a wild political cycle, he said.
..... "The country has been going through its own communal post-traumatic stress disorder," Waldron said.
..... "I am 73 years old, and there has been no time in my lifetime like this," he added. "This is a whole new thing. I study an this,and this very, very scary in many ways."
..... We expect what we read to be true. The American Psychological Association noted on its website in March [2024] that "detecting false information is difficult. when we encounter new information, we tend to focus on understanding it and deciding what to do next, rather than evaluating it for accuracy. It takes effort to compare new information with what we already know: when new information is false but plausible, we can learn it as fact."
..... The APA said people are also more likely to trust information from "in group sources rather than out-group ones" - say, neighbors or Facebook friends. People are also more likely to believe information that stirs anxious or angry feelings.
..... This may be unique moment, but the tenor of the time remands Waldron, a history buff, of the disillusionment that followed the assassination of 1960s leaders even as the Vietnam War was picking up steam. The collective trust in government and media that helped people feel secure began to erode. then an infamous conspiracy theory emerged.
..... The official investigation into President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot the president. Many doubted this conclusion, and rumors spread of groups like the CIA, the mafia or even Cuba working to take Kennedy down after they bay of Pigs invasion.
..... Contrast that with a present era marked by its own political instability, unreliable information and rapid societal changes. Stepping out to look for drones in the sky seems like a harmless pastime.
..... How many are truely filling the sky? Today's [12/09/2024] leaders could do better by making more definite statements, Waldron added.
..... "It would be nice to get out ahead of it and have somebody speak with authority with actual information," he said. "that would make people fell better. But to say, 'We don't know,' that's not going to help people go to sleep between 2 and 5 AM. up in Morristown."

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