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Social Media Cascades

The rise of social media has also seen a great increase in the spread of news among users, and in the past two years this has started to pose some degree of public harm. Social media allows us to quickly and easily both read about current events the instant they occur as well as share these stories with our friends/followers. The issue that has been particularly emphasized in recent years due to politics has to do with news articles/rumors based around false news being rapidly and widely spread among people. This leads to misinformation and devaluation of proper true news stories.

The article I have linked below discusses how fake news spreads on social media site Twitter, and offers some explanation on why this is so common. Fake news is shown to spread similar to a cascade, because if a news source or a friend has shared a news article you are now more likely to also retweet/share the article. In addition, as the number of retweets/shares increases on a tweet, it is more likely to be seen and shared simply because of its popularity regardless of whether a friend shared it. These two factors help to create a cascade effect. And this article specifically shows how fake news stories actually spread much faster than true ones demonstrating how social media can create a fake news cascade. One reason as to why fake news seems to spread faster than real news, is because fake news is simply more enticing and surprising making people more likely to want to share it with others.

Overall, fake news is an issue that is only aggravated as cascades occur through social media. Understanding how fake news travels through cascades however could prove to be helpful in combatting this and returning to trustworthy verified news stories.

Link: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-fake-news-twitter-20180308-story.html

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