Fake News and Information Cascades
Information Cascades occur when the information that you can infer from other people is more powerful than your own private information, influencing you to follow other people’s decisions.
WeChat is an online messaging and social media platform with 889 million users, mostly from the mainland China. Unlike Facebook, the “News Feed” on WeChat contains the information generated by the users’ networks (friends and friends of friends). There was no influence from algorithms that are similar to what Facebook uses to present their users with more diverse information. Information on WeChat’s users’ news feed tends to come from their strong ties and “seemingly” trustworthy.
Recently, there has been a spread of fake news on WeChat’s platform. Information received through strong ties is more likely to be trusted, and online social networks platform like WeChat allow individuals to transmit information to many friends at once. This results in “rumor cascades” running fast and deeply among the networks through social media platforms. Given the nature of WeChat – private networks of strong ties and limited ability for WeChat to alter the information and filter fake news – enhance the information cascades of fake news. People may imitate the sharing the fake news behavior because there are informational effects or direct-benefit effects. For example, seeing a lot of people sharing the same content gives users good reason to look up because it might make them seem up-to-date (direct benefit effects) or simply content sharing by a lot of people seem more trustworthy and worth sharing (informational effects).
An interesting question here is: Is it better for social media platforms to use algorithms to alter users’ content or to let the content displayed as how it is?
Reference: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/wechat-misinformation-china.php