Spread of Fake News on Social Media
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
The article above details a study conducted by Vosoughi et al. on the differential spread of true and false news stories on Twitter. By examining 126,000 stories retweeted by 3 million people, the study contains interesting findings on the differing network dynamics of truths and falsehoods. Given how fake news has impacted various aspects of our lives, from the causes we support to the presidential candidates we elect, Vosoughi et al. enrich our understanding of how and why fake news spreads like wildfire.
The key finding of Vosoughi et al.’s research is that fake news on Twitter diffuses much faster (reaching 1500 people 6 times faster) and farther (diffuses to more than 1000 people much more routinely) than factual news. The phenomenon should come as no surprise to many of us, given the rapid and pervasive spread of fake news in the 2016 presidential election. What is more intriguing are the network dynamics behind the spread of fake news. As Vosoughi et al. discover, fake news is characterized by a viral branching process, where it “infects” friends and friends of friends with far greater speed and momentum. In other words, fake news is particularly capable of diffusing within a connected component on Twitter—it reaches a node 19 nodes away from the ego (i.e. reaches a depth of 19) nearly 10 times faster than true news reaches a depth of 10. Since online social networks often feature a giant connected component, they are structurally vulnerable to the spread of fake news to large swathes of users.
Why, exactly, is fake news more viral than true stories? One explanation is that fake news is more novel than the truth due to its sensational or controversial nature. Given that the novelty of fake news implies that an individual is “in the know” or has unique “insider” information, Twitter users derive benefits to their own social status from retweeting fake news. This suggests that even Twitter users that are connected by weak links may retweet each other’s tweets to derive a mutually beneficial outcome—mutual social validation. Hence, there is a role of self-interest in explaining the inherent virality of fake news.