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How Information Cascades Facilitate the Spread of Fake News

Information cascades are a phenomenon where individuals make a decision based on the information they obtain through observing the actions of others while ignoring the information they have gained through their own personal experiences. In the age of social media, this phenomenon has led to the widespread dissemination and subsequent mass acceptance of innumerable instances of “fake news.” This in turn has led to the misinforming of many in the general public about a wide variety of topics, from the US presidential election, to the anti-vaccination movement, to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

This particular article highlights a fake news story that is quite a bit less dangerous than the aforementioned examples. It’s focus is on a video from Time News International which claims to show a commercial airliner struggling to land in a storm, eventually doing a 360-degree flip before touching down safely on the ground. The video went viral on Facebook last month, being viewed over 13 million times. As it turns out, the video was a computer-generated fake originally produced for an unrelated, non-deceptive purpose. In this article, Geoffrey Fowler delves into how fake news like this is able to spread so effectively.

What it really boils down to is information cascading. When I first saw the video (today), it was clear to me that it was obviously fake. I’d like to think that’s because I could tell their was something “off” about the way the plane moved in the video, but it may be the case that I, too, would have been fooled if there wasn’t a boldfaced  headline at the top of the page denoting the video as fake news. However, Autodesk’s “Fake or Foto” Quiz suggests the latter. I took the quiz, which tests how accurately you are able to distinguish fake photos from real ones, and scored only a 33 percent (granted, I wasn’t trying very hard or anything, but people don’t tend to scrutinize everything they scroll through on their social media feed). According to the results page at the end of the quiz, less than 43 percent of people who took the quiz were able to identify fake photos at least half the time. Fake news producers often use deceptively altered images like these to provide a layer of authenticity to a particular fake news story, leading to a higher likelihood that a user will be fooled into believing and sharing that post. And, as we learned in class, it only takes a small handful of people to start the information cascade. When a friend shares something on social media, you tend to trust that they have verified the authenticity of what they’re sharing, so you let your guard down and usually accept what they’ve shared as real without fact-checking for yourself. But it’s highly likely that everyone else has that same mindset, so you’re at the mercy of the original poster, and you never know what their motives are.

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/18/i-fell-facebook-fake-news-heres-why-millions-you-did-too/?utm_term=.9170f2afd2de

“Fake or Foto” Quiz:

https://area.autodesk.com/fakeorfoto/play/

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