False news travels faster than true stories
Link:
- https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308
- https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/fake-news-in-the-age-of-covid-19
MIT News found that humans, not bots, are responsible for spreading misleading information, where false news speeds faster around Twitter because people retweet inaccurate news. False news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. Although reading news on social media tends to be false news, Twitter still became people’s main source of news which can be seen as dangerous. This reminds me of the viral spread of Covid-19 fake news. There was misinformation spreading throughout social media which many people believed and retweeted or reshared the news. I found this very detrimental because there would be a lot of consequences from the spread of misinformation. For example, false news revealed that the US or Chinese government created the virus–which could have caused chaos in political relationships. Another example could be misinformation regarding false treatments or misunderstandings of the disease, which is very risky for people’s health and survival.
This relates to what we’ve been learning: Information Cascades, the phenomenon that reveals that people make the same decision in the same manner. Due to how people did not truly know what other people knew, they believed in what the false news stated. Especially in the case of Covid-19, it was a new novel disease with no prior information that could have helped rational decision-making. Based on what people have said or have done, such as supporting false treatments, people tend to make the decision sequentially, and people would just observe the choices made by those who acted earlier, so seeing how the previous person has reshared this piece of information, I should do too. With the vast amount of social pressure, especially evident on social media may explain the reason why false news spreads so much faster.