The phrase ‘fake news’ is uttered almost on a daily basis by the current President of the United States and it is often used to either distract from his glaring lack of knowledge on a subject or merely to dismiss an opponent without the need to offer a more nuanced comment. The medium through which he loves to quote ‘fake news’ and share his personal thoughts is through Twitter. Roosevelt had his fireside chats, Reagan offered personal, scripted TV messages while Trump prefers a hastily tweeted “Sad!”.
To delve deeper into the current methods of news spreading, I want to highlight a paper that was published in Science by Soroush Vosoughi and colleagues on the 9th March in which they found that untrue tweets spread significantly quicker and further than tweets deemed to be truthful. They did this by collecting roughly 126,000 stories tweeted between 2006 and 2017 by roughly 3 million people. Tweets were classified as true or false using information from six independent fact checking organisations that displayed a very high degree of classification agreement.
Vosoughi and his colleagues also found that false political news tweets travelled deeper and reached more people than false news about terrorism, natural disasters or urban legends. Furthermore it was found that human behaviour contributed more to the spread of false tweets than automated robots.
This paper contains a lot of insightful findings yet I think the notion that false tweets tended to be more novel, and spread further, is not all that surprising. Perhaps novel tweets conjure up greater emotional responses such as anger and desperation and this compels people to share their own thoughts.
I recently read about an article written by a former The Atlantic comments editor who was tasked with approving or declining all comments submitted to his published photos in which he felt that the majority of comments were negative. He also thought that over the years he had rejected to post 10/15% of comments since they were either rude or obscenely offensive to others. Perhaps writing a nasty comment on an online forum or sharing a racy, false tweet is too easy and we feel detached and free of repercussions when online.
This paper throws up a lot of interesting questions and I encourage you to read the findings in greater detail (link below). We certainly need more studies analysing the spread of news and more debate and discussion around the impacts of false news. A lot of current media focus is on the impact of false news on the 2016 US Presidential Election but we need to expand this further. We also need to go further than just the US, with the need for international discussions about this issue since social media networks and the spread of information is so global. This effort will involve action and cooperation from technology companies, social media networks, governments and researchers, to name a few. This is one of the most important issues of our time and one that we should not shy away from.
Dan
“The spread of true and false news online”, Link
Daniel Callaghan 