Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
Why is it that fake news spreads faster and remains current a lot longer than the truth? For instance, any kind of scandal in magazines get more attention than the real story. One explanation may be because false statements tend to be more surprising than true ones and, naturally, people tend to pay more attention to shocking news because they want to confirm that it is in fact true. It could also be that fake news tells a more interesting or entertaining story, so it spreads quickly. Gossip in a social network is a good illustration of this.
Nowadays, through technology and social media, particularly twitter, news travels even faster than by word of mouth, often becoming viral. According to researchers examining Twitter posts, political announcements resulted in the largest spread of false news, claiming that the truth took about “six times longer to reach 1,500 people” relative to falsehood. A major scandal in American society today that is still pertinent is the presidential election and Russia’s role in it. This story has been an ongoing investigation for nearly two years because the idea of another country having an effect on US presidential elections is unsettling.
This article relates to the strength of weak ties. It demonstrates how weak ties can be crucial in a social network. Let’s take for example a social network containing two friends: A and B, where each have their own separate friend groups, making the edge between them a local bridge, an edge between two nodes that have no common friends. In this situation, B shares novel information on some social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, and A notices the post. Now, A’s reaction to this is most likely to discuss this information with his group of friends, since the information is likely new to his friends as well. People like to share novel information because it makes them seem up-to-date on what’s relevant. So, when someone, such as an acquaintance, a celebrity or popular figure, or even an enemy, not in your immediate friend group shares any new information, you tend to pass it along to other people and then those people share it with other people, and so on.
It’s reasonable to believe the vast majority is aware of the fact that most of what circulates in the news is an inaccurate portrayal of the truth. Yet, interestingly, people are still susceptible to this deception and feed into the lies. If we had the ability to terminate the lies and rumors, you would think that we should do so, but then eliminating them would make society less connected as whole, so now we’re faced with continuing the spread of lies or disrupting unity.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fake-news-lies-spread-faster-social-media-truth-does-n854896