F alse news is more novel than true news, and that may be why we share the false much faster and more widely. Prominent responses to false news include surprise, fear and disgust. True news tends to be met with sadness, joy, anticipation and trust. Humans are more likely than automated processes to be responsible for the spread of fake news.
These insights emerge from a large and impressive study published on 9 March in the journal Science. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, interested in how and why true and false news stories spread differently, used , stories that had been tweeted by 3 million people a total of 4.
The data spanned , when Twitter began, to The study is unsettling reading, especially in light of what has so far emerged from US intelligence agencies, congressional inquiries and the special prosecutor Robert Mueller about use of social media to distort the presidential election.
A Brief History of Fake News | Center for Information Technology and Society - UC Santa Barbara
Apart from effects on elections and referendums, fake news in social media can assist hate speech to turn into communal violence more quickly. A cascade starts with a Twitter user making an assertion about a topic — with words, images or links — and continues in an unbroken chain of retweets. The researchers analysed cascades about news stories that six fact-checking organisations agreed were true or agreed were false. False political news reached more people faster and went deeper into their networks than any other category of false information.
Why fake news on social media travels faster than the truth
The study compared the emotional content of replies to true and false rumours by using about 32, Twitter hashtags and a lexicon of about , English words that associate with eight basic emotions: And should we even be worried about it at all? First the most famous example of an indisputably or so you would think fake news story that has had real-world consequences. On 4 December, a North Carolina man opened fire at the Washington pizzeria Comet Ping Pong , which an online conspiracy theory purports to be the headquarters of a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton.
Googling Pizzagate is not advised. The background to this extraordinary story has been explored in detail on the Reply All podcast. I know this from representing drug dealers. Yes, it stretches the boundaries of belief — but a lot of fake news does.
What is fake news? How to spot it and what you can do to stop it
The poll lends weight to the suggestion that the US election result was influenced by a widespread belief in fake news among Trump supporters. Analysis by BuzzFeed found that fake news stories drew more shares and engagement during the final three months of the campaign than reports from for example the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, pooh-poohed suggestion that fake news travelling on the network could have swung the election.
But, on Thursday, Facebook announced that it would begin flagging fake news stories with the help of users and outside fact-checkers.
Navigation menu
In its purest form, fake news is completely made up, manipulated to resemble credible journalism and attract maximum attention and, with it, advertising revenue. With clicks come profit: More than pro-Trump fake news websites were being run by teenagers in one town in Macedonia. Strictly speaking, fake news is completely made up and designed to deceive readers to maximise traffic and profit.
Humour sites, too, can be easily taken at face value, especially if they touch on current events or politics and if they appear free of context on social media. That time Russell Crowe thought Clickhole was real pic.