Information Cascades and “Fake News”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/opinion/sunday/truth-lies-spread-online.html
In today’s information filled world it would seem that obtaining the truth would be easier, but in reality, telling truth apart from fiction is harder than it seems. However, as researchers from MIT have concluded, people, unknowingly have contributed to the spread of misinformation. “The top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people” (Vosoughi, Roy, Aral 1), whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Fake news creates more cascades as misinformation not only spreads more than the truth, but it also spreads faster.
The researchers concluded that one of the main reasons fake news spread faster, was due to their emotional appeal. In their research, the MIT scientists looked at how many retweets a tweet obtained. They discovered that fraudulent tweets contained a greater level of novelty. By using computerized methods for uncovering emotional content via word use, they found that false stories had a greater probability of containing emotional buzzwords. These buzzwords managed to evoke fear and disgust in people, versus the words in true stories which inspired anticipation, joy, trust, and sadness.
Not only did the word use allow for cascades, but If you look at the model for information cascades we learned in class, we can see why the spread of fake news makes sense. In information cascades people copy, or in this case retweet, since the decisions of others since it conveys information. According to the research copying, others helped update people’s beliefs, this is because there was a higher spread of false political news compared to other sources of misinformation. Then the other basic ingredients for an information-based cascade can be seen based on how the social media platform is set up. People have a decision to make, whether to retweet or not. People make decisions in a sequence or the number of total retweets, and you can see this sequence. If you put together all the elements for an information cascade, it is easy to tell why fake news can spread.