Game Theory and Facebook’s Fake News Issue
The article linked below uses game theory to address the recent issues with Facebook’s fake news that have come to light. Jeff Ely, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison are professors within the Economics department at Northwestern University who have chosen to analyze the Facebook fake news phenomenon through the lens of game theory. “Fake news”, as it has now been dubbed refers to Facebook’s practice of echoing what are allegedly news stories grounded in little to no real fact. Fake news has been credited with influencing people’s opinions on the presidential candidates and the results of the 2016 presidential election.
The “game” at play here, as outlined by Professor Ely, is whether or not Facebook should put a filter on what their algorithms perceive to be fake news. As discussed in class, game theory involves players each choosing between the payoffs they have available to them. In the case of Facebook’s fake news, there are initially two players: one is the person or network that fabricates news stories and the other is the reader that comes across the stories that have been put out. SInce the reader knows about the first player, they are aware that any story they read may have some bias involved
With Facebook fake news, however, there is a third player involved. When Facebook filters the news stories we see on our newsfeed, the reader is not only more likely to believe any piece of news that appears on their timeline, but also provides a “strategic incentive” to the person or network that puts out news to spread fake news. The readers will believe the fake news more, and the fake news source is unlikely to be discovered as fraudulent.
It is not enough to simply prescribe one treatment to “fix” the Facebook fake news issue. Game theory allows us to analyze the payoffs of all the players that may be involved in an instance of Facebook’s fake news, and form an educated opinion on how we may approach fake news in the future.
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/12/economics-explainer-using-fake-news/