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The Spread of True and False News Online

In The Spread of True and False News Online, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral—Professors at MIT—talk about the spread of specifically false news and how humans play a role. Over the past decade or so the world has seen an increase in false news due to the increase in publication online along with the shear volume of users that can access it. While the majority of false news is said to be spread through the use of bots and computer programming, the professors at MIT say it’s in fact humans that are allowing false news to spread at much faster speeds than the truth.

In class we are learning about information cascades and how they can spread through a network. One of the decision variables that helps someone switch and continue the cascade is the payoff—what you get if you switch. In terms of false news, the MIT professors term the payoff as the novelty. Humans see the false news which is usually something way out there and “new” or “novel” to what everyone else is hearing. As a result, we think it’s more interesting or there is a better payoff and therefore are more likely to share this piece of “novel” information. What they found was pretty astonishing. After reviewing over 100,000 cascades on twitter, they found that false cascades spread six times faster than the true cascades. They also found that the depth (number of retweet hops from the origin tweet over time) was significantly higher and reaching more people than a true piece of news. What they also found was that, bots spread false news and true news at the same rate. Indicating again that humans are behind the dramatic spread of false news.

What can we do with this information? For me—an active user of social media and aware that I should check every article before I buy into it—I thought it was extremely interesting to learn that bots might not be the real culprit behind fake news. Additionally, this study can bring light to checking ever piece of news before believing it. You can see how easily false news can spread and why it spreads. Maybe next time fact check the article with another source. Towards the end of their research paper, the professors at MIT talked about decreasing the polarization of our society by creating resources to stop the cascades. Some of these resources would be outlets to report false news via a click on Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, giving each article a score on how true it really is. There is a long way to go in decreasing the spread or cascade of fake news. However, understanding how it gets spread is the first step in slowing down the cascades.

 

Study:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

 

Short Video about their research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dms5ZP-BHV8&feature=youtu.be

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