The Spread of Fake News
Fake news and its ability to spread quickly on social media platforms such as Facebook has garnered a lot of attention recently. This article, discusses a study which focused on why fake news is able to spread so quickly. The researcher who worked on this subject, concluded that there are three factors that explain a network’s inability to distinguish fake news from the facts. First, they believe that people are overwhelmed with information Additionally, people are constrained by time. Nobody has the time to sift through and verify all of the information that they encounter on a daily basis. Finally, the researchers attribute the viral nature of fake news to the underlying structure of social networks.
Pertaining to our class, this paper discusses how certain network structures have aided in the spread of fake news. For example, the fact that friends form clusters mean that they usually all have access to the same news. As a result, once a fake news article has been shared between friends, they will continue to share the news without it being countered by outside information that may dispute the claims that the news article has made. In addition, the connected nature of social media and the existence of “superconnected” people who have thousands if not millions of followers can also contribute to the rapid dissemination of false information.
Source:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fake-news-goes-viral-mdash-heres-the-math/