Misinformation on Social Media – Bots and Echo Chambers
Misinformation, or so-called “fake news,” has been under close scrutiny lately, especially with the large role it played in the 2016 United States Presidential Election. False articles and news stories have been circulating social media and are becoming more and more difficult to differentiate from real, reliable information. Just how this happens and why it is happening so frequently is an issue that Indiana University Professor Filippo Menczer has been investigating for quite some time now. He points to two main contributors to the fake news phenomenon: bots and echo chambers.
Bots, which are fake accounts controlled by software, are constantly looking more and more like real human users. These bots are contributing to the spread of misinformation by sharing false stories via various social media platforms. Since they are nothing more than lines of code, hundreds and thousands of them can be orchestrated to share the same, untrue articles. Then, other humans see all these posts, especially as they show up as “trending” topics on facebook and twitter. This gives social media users the impression that lots of other human users are sharing the news. From here, an information cascade starts where people are blindly accepting and sharing these fake news stories that were never shared by any real people in the first place! These bots give social media consumers a false sense that they are receiving “perfect information” which leads to information cascades of completely fabricated information.
Echo chambers also play a vital role in the spreading of fake news. Since people like to read things they agree with, it is no surprise that many people only add or follow people on social media with the same viewpoints that they hold themselves. Since Professor Menczer and his team have proven this to be a common occurrence, all it takes is one person to start a false news information cascade. Once someone reads an untrue news story that aligns with their beliefs, they will likely share it with their close group of similar-minded friends. After it hits the newsfeed, most of the poster’s followers or friends will often share and repost it without reading anything more than the title. Then, the news bounces around the walls of this echo chamber, simultaneously spreading the false information and keeping out any contradictory thoughts that go against said misinformation. It truly is a vicious cycle.
Professor Menczer continues studying these social media habits, hoping to find some way to stop this viral spread of misinformation. Since bots are becoming harder to detect and echo chambers are becoming tougher to break up, this is not an easy task. At any rate, it is important to think twice about sharing things online and potentially avoid the spread of fake news.
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-misinformation-social-mediacan-technology.html