Spreading False News Online
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
In The Spread of True and False News Online by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, the authors discuss the trend that leads different types of news to become viral in the current media climate of “fake news.” By using a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, the authors were able to analyze 126,000 different rumors spread by around 3 million people. A large portion of the article describes how the research was conducted (through automated programs) and then explaining the quantitative data extrapolated from the research. By using fact-checking organizations, they were able to separate the rumors into two categories: false rumors and true rumors. Thus, it was observed that false rumors “diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information” (Vosoughi 2). Therefore, many more people retweeted information that was false than they did for information that was true. It was assumed that this affect was caused due to a viral branching process for the fake news compared to broadcast dynamics for true news.
The research is meant to show that fake news “can drive the misallocation of resources during terror attacks and natural disasters, the misalignment of business investments, and misinformed elections” (Vosoughi 5). Therefore, seeing how fake news is spread and the motivations behind spreading it is extremely important. The research shows that people are more likely to retweet fake news than truth and that human behavior contributes more to the problem of fake news than the recent focus on the role of internet bots in spreading fake news.
This article relates to class because throughout class, we have been learning about information cascades and payoffs. On the internet, the popularity of a news can be modeled by an information cascade. If a news article or network is gaining traction, it will follow a “rich get richer” dynamic in which it will become viral. This leads to other news outlets either dying off or also gaining traction. Taking this and applying it to fake news, since fake news may sometimes be more entertaining to readers (regardless of if they know that it is fake or not), there is a higher chance they will share it with their friends (with increased payoff such as popularity among friends).