Information Cascades in “Fake News”
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-countering-fake-news-contagions.html
The words “fake news” have become a hot-button political topic with the current US administration and last year’s election. Many people from all sides assert that certain news being spread around is not real and is purposely portraying one person or group in a bad light to gain traction for the opposing views. This idea is especially prominent and believable with the prevalence of social media as a news outlet in our current society. It is extremely easy to hit share on something that could be a misleading headline or simply a false article. This follows from the idea of information cascades that we discussed in lecture. People are likely to agree with something if their friends also agree with it – in our terms, information-based reasoning.
This article proposes an interesting way to combat the spread of fake news. Treating social media as a network and fake news as a virus across that network, it can be combated with a more believable true story. In the article, they call this a “stronger contagion” than the fake news. Given our theory of information cascades, this stronger contagion would spread through the network. This idea of “strength” is also interesting as it adds a new dimension to our thoughts about information cascades. In a sense, not all information has equal weight – for example, we are more likely to believe a story from what we consider a reliable news source over a story from what we consider a biased news source. This extra dimension shows how complicated this problem of “fake news” is – what exactly gives this “fake news” that is spreading around so much weight and how can we decrease its weight? This problem is being actively investigated – in fact, just recently Facebook turned over “more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads to congressional committees investigating the Kremlin’s influence operation during the 2016 presidential campaign” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/technology/facebook-russian-ads.html). It will be interesting to see how this investigation turns out and how this idea of fake news and information cascades affects our politics in the future.