Fighting Fake News
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/business/media/fight-fake-news.html
Of the material we’ve covered in this class, one topic that stood out to me as immediately applicable to current events is the topic of information cascades, and specifically how they relate to fake news. That is, misinformation spreading from one person to the next, and reaching a tipping point after which each person copies the decision of the person before them (the decision to accept a piece of information as fact). Left unchecked, they can spread very far, very quickly. I’m sure this parallel has been drawn numerous times before by other students, so I’d like to focus my attention on how established properties of information cascades are being picked up on as ways to combat fake news. The linked article discusses ways in which to stem the proliferation of fake news as a means of reducing it’s harmful effects. Two main takeaways from the article are that it is important to i) encourage scrutiny, and ii) present new information. Presenting new information is described as giving the audience new and credible information, which has been found to do a thorough job at unseating misinformation. Encouraging scrutiny is described as attempting to get the readers/audience into a skeptical mindset, that is, encouraging an audience to give a thorough analysis to information they encounter.
I noticed that both of these take steps towards employing a property of information cascades covered in class. That is, the fact that cascades are fragile. We discussed how because cascades can be based on a small amount of initial information, such as a headline on a news article on Facebook claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. Given a cascade of decisions to accept this information, all it would take is one person receiving superior information in order to have that person overturn the cascade and decide to reject the claim. This presentation of new information could come in the form of a site like Snopes providing a thorough and credible debunking. Thus, one approach that could potentially increase the solvency of the fake news cascade problem is for that person to publicly signal their decision in a manner that reaches a wide audience. In our context, there is even the potential for the new decision to spread back up the cascade network and cause previous participants to change their decision. Therefore, not only would this stem an information cascade and prevent it from spreading, it could even take steps towards rectifying the harm of misinformation that was done in the first place and hopefully serving as the basis for a powerful after-the-fact solution.