Twitter Cascades– True and Untrue information cascades spread equally
This article discusses briefly a new discovery that was recently conducted by a postdoctoral researcher Jonas Juul right here at Cornell. Unsurprisingly, Juul’s mentor is Jon Kleinberg himself. Juul’s research primarily focused on exploring information cascades in tweets on Twitter. Previously, data from a 2018 Twitter study had shown that tweets with false or slanderous information were retweeted and spread more quickly than tweets with accurate or truthful information. The size of a tweet’s cascades indicates its popularity–the larger the cascade the more popular the tweet. However, Juul’s study examined the cascades of tweets (basically how fast a tweet was retweeted and spread) and noted that untruthful tweets didn’t actually spread faster from tweets with correct information. Interestingly, the cascades for both true and untrue tweets were virtually identical. While Juul noted that the phenomenon of people tending to spread false information online is in fact commonplace, there appeared to be no indication from the cascades that untrue tweets were retweeted more than true ones. If anything, these two kinds of tweets seemed to reach an equal number of users. Juul also commented that whether or not these untrustworthy tweets spread was really dependent on the users themselves.
The article didn’t go very in-depth about how the information cascades work with tweets and retweets, but I was completely fascinated by this study. It does always seem as if tweets or posts with misinformation are spread more quickly through social media sites, but these findings propose a completely different view of tweets spreading through with regards to information cascades. To a certain degree, I think it’s a bit disheartening that the cascades are identical because it means that it is far more difficult for social media companies to find cascades that are spreading misinformation and flag them before they are spread further. There are also thousands of cascades on Twitter and tweets that are going viral constantly, so in addition to having no distinguishable features to these negative cascades, it’s not surprising that media companies haven’t discovered methods to easily halt these cascades. Knowing that the power of stopping such cascades lies mainly in the hands of users definitely reminds us of the importance of using platforms such as Twitter responsibly and for us to think twice before doing performing actions that are simple as hitting the “retweet’” button on a post.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/11/viral-news-true-and-untrue-moves-equally-through-twitter