Information Cascading in Social Media News
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312095504.htm
For a long while, people generally got their news from a small set of places. It would generally be from a smaller amount of big news sources where the news is carefully vetted, though it still could be very biased. With the advent of social media, a lot of that has changed. While many people still get their news from the same big news media companies, an increasingly large number of people have been getting their news from social media. While that is not necessarily a negative thing, news on social media is not as carefully vetted as news from bigger social media companies, so individuals must do more work to make sure the news that they are getting is reliable. In deciding the reliability of news, information cascades can play a large role and can cause a lot of fake news to be circulated due to a small number of people’s incorrect judgments.
Information cascading is a phenomenon in which a large number of people make choices based on the choices and information of a small number of people, even when they think that they are relying on a larger source of information. This is very prevalent when people are making decisions about the reliability of social media news since people believe information that has been endorsed by a lot of people. Specifically talking about twitter, people are more likely to believe tweets with a lot of likes and retweets. That means that the more likes a tweet gets, the more likely people are to believe the news and like the tweet itself without verifying it. Which can easily cause an information cascade. Fake news in particular often gains a lot of momentum because it is often provocative and exciting in nature, which increases the likelihood that it will be liked or retweeted by people regardless if it is true or not. So it is spread around easier than other news that might be true, but a lot less exciting. This is compounded by the fact that many people may only like or retweet something because they think it might be funny, and not that they actually believe it, which means people might be trusting the judgement of a small amount of people who do not even care if the news is true.
Sources:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories, study finds: Research project finds humans, not bots, are primarily responsible for spread of misleading information.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 March 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312095504.htm>.