Fake News and Information Cascades
This article discusses how fake news proliferates across social media through both network effects and behavioral biases. The author describes how an individual who may initially distrust a news story the first time they view it could change their minds after seeing it shared by many of their friends. This can cause information cascades where fake news can be spread through friend networks even when people’s initial reactions are to disbelieve it. The article also discusses how this effect can lead to behavioral biases where repetition can make an individual believe something even if there is no direct proof of it. An example of this is a person who might believe that Obama was a Muslim just because they remember seeing a lot of articles about it in the past.
The information cascades described in the article relate directly to what we learned about in class. Information cascades can make people make rational decisions to follow the crowd even when it goes against what they believed before. The restaurant example, for instance, describes how someone would choose restaurant A if they saw a few other people choose it even if they had personal information that made them want to choose restaurant B. This is the same phenomenon with fake news. If a person sees enough of their friends share fake news, they could begin to believe it even if they wouldn’t have believed it in isolation. As we discussed in class, information cascades can make people rationally choose to follow the crowd, which in this case has led to the fake news becoming widespread through social media.