Cascade of misinformation
https://futurism.com/cape-town-water-crisis-pushed-back
This article is about the spread of “fake news” through the Internet, and that in fact “fake news” propagate faster than “factual news” in a social media network. We have touched upon information cascade in class, and I thought this article very effectively analyzes how information spread in a social network.
Many social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, are being held responsible for the spread of misinformation. The article explains that maybe the fault is not on these social platforms, but instead on human tendencies to spread fake ideas. According to a team of researchers in MIT, fake news were 70% more likely than factual news to be retweeted. The researchers concluded that this may be due to the following reasons: first, “novel” information were more likely to be retweeted, second, information that cause disgust, alarming emotion were more likely to be retweeted. Fake news were generally more novel than factual news, and it usually caused disgust, alarming reaction.
In class we have studied the effect of information cascade, and that once a certain threshold is passed, everyone decides to follow. This article shows that such effect is in fact even more accelerated for spread of misinformation, and perhaps the reason for abundance of unregulated fake news on social media.