How misinformation spreads on WeChat
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/wechat-misinformation-china.php
This article discusses how information cascade occurs in WeChat – the social media app that is used by most of the Chinese immigrants in the United States and claims 889 million users worldwide. Unlike Facebook and other major U.S. social media platform, the news feed on WeChat is not as open and public. As discussed in the article, “content on WeChat is always curated by the individual user and his or her social network, never algorithmically”. This means that WeChat cannot tweak platform design to prevent the spread of misinformation or the presence of filter bubbles. While Facebook might alter its algorithm to bring more varied content to users, such changes are not applicable to WeChat.
WeChat also has official accounts “OA” that can be created by anyone and attracts a crowd of followers. OA can make a post just like the Facebook posts, but there is no commenting or tagging features. If OA choose to enable reader comments, the comments viewing privacy is stilled determined by OA, which allows OA to curate a thread of comments that are all in favors of OA’s opinion, making information cascades even more convincing. In addition, all discussion about the news content takes place within the bounds of private and semi-private networks. Information cascades through networks of friends and acquaintances, rather than across an open, connected public sphere.
Because of the way of how information spreads on WeChat, it is easy for fake news to spread across a large group of people. If an OA posts some information, its followers can forward that information to their “moments”, WeChat’s news feed feature with audience consists of the user’s friends. Therefore, this piece of information is spread across a network of trusted friends, making it harder to be challenged or terminated. In addition, since the OA can select which comments are displayed publicly, public censorship has limited power to any sensitive topics.