The Spread of Misinformation through Social Media
This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses a problem the world is facing with the spread of misinformation (fake news). Some of the most common reasons why individuals choose to spread false information is to gain more support behind a cause (political campaign) or to generate profit by promoting a website or product. A common strategy is to have many fake accounts (sometimes bots) promote a radical fake idea and create an illusion that the idea is actually popular. The consequences include people adopting the fake idea or having a hard time understanding what is true. The spread of fake news is an example of diffusion in networks. As we saw in lecture, only a couple nodes need to adopt a new idea in order for the idea to spread throughout the cluster. To reach further areas of the network, nodes within different clusters would have to adopt the “fake idea.”
Social media platforms can also help unpopular ideas become popular. The 2017 French Presidential Election is a good example of this phenomenon. An initial small cluster of Marine Le Pen supporters posted tweets at the same time with hashtags like “#LaFranceVoteMarine.” They also had bots spit out more tweets with the same hashtags. Suddenly, these hashtags started trending on Twitter, which helped Le Pen gain more media coverage and support for her campaign. This small group of individuals were not “popular” in the network, but they were still able to make their ideas quite popular.
This situation is directly related to what we learned in lecture; popularity is not independent and follows a power-law distribution. People base their decisions on what others do. It is similar to the Music Lab experiment discussed in class. In a “universe” that did not display the number of listens for a particular song, the number of listens was much more evenly distributed among all the songs. Whereas when the number of listens was displayed, the number of listens varied significantly between songs. Social media allows certain initially unpopular ideas to become very popular in a relatively short period of time.