Information cascades on Twitter
New study explains why fake news is perceived as real on Twitter
This article discusses fake news in relation to Twitter. Specifically, it examines the importance of retweets as a huge factor for people when trying to identify if something on Twitter is true and legitimate information. A study was conducted by researchers in South Korea trying to understand what led people to believe tweets labeled as either “news” or “rumors. The study found that the labels for each tweet did affect how people thought, but this was not incredibly significant. The most important factor recognizing tweets as legitimate, was mainly by the amount of retweets an individual tweet received. The study supplied random sets of tweets to over 600 participants in order test the hypothesis. It found that there was a direct correlation between message believability and number of retweets. After the initial testing, participants stated that the number of tweets directly affected their thinking in whether the information provided was credible or not.
This process directly relates to the idea of an information cascade because people are seeing how other people reacted to the tweet when the first viewed. When many people ahead of you, have chosen to retweet the information, information cascades say that you will respond similarly. On Twitter, in many cases, part of the issue is the multitude bots who publish tweets (fake or misleading information) and are subsequently retweeted by other bots who exacerbate the issue. The bots can be the first ones to retweet, and one enough have retweeted, the information cascade begins leading for actual humans to begin retweeting. This can have severe consequences for spreading false information and public opinion.