The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News

[ehrnst]

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

..........................................................................................................
"The key takeaway is really that content that arouses strong emotions spreads further, faster, more deeply, and more broadly on Twitter,” said Tromble, the political scientist, in an email. “This particular finding is consistent with research in a number of different areas, including psychology and communication studies. It’s also relatively intuitive.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/largest-study-ever-fake-news-mit-twitter/555104/

[bettyellen]

1. Much of this news was created by the same groups who work with bot farms- who initially boosted the

This crap on Twitter, Google, FB and dozens of other places. That set the scene for ordinary people to accept it.

[ehrnst]

4. Not just ordinary people

A devout lefty friend of mine who supported Bernie in the primaries spread the OBSERVER (you know, **Jared Kushner's publication** at the time) article, published during the General that stated "Hillary Clinton campaign taking $10 a month from 80 year old woman's bank account every month without her consent".

She shared it on FB with with the comment "CAN ANYONE TELL ME HOW THIS IS ETHICAL?????" - and four of us pointed out the problems with the article, the source, and how it was based on a local story in a town newspaper, when her grandson, who was a Trump supporter told the paper this was happening. And it was clear to anyone who had been anywhere near fundraising for an org or campaign that the woman had accidentally hit "monthly" rather than "one time" when she donated the $10 to Hillary's campaign, and was confused about how to get that stopped and refunded.

My friend didn't take the link down. She's a scientist, but when she gets emotional, she gets very reactionary, and doesn't stop to examine why she would believe that HRC's campaign would try to fleece an elderly woman of $10 a month. That's like believing that there is widespread voter fraud, which makes no logical sense just in terms of return/vs risk of arrest, and my friend will refute voter fraud fake stories on FB with every factual source at hand.

She did man the phones for Hillary, and canvassed (because Trump), but proceeded to post on FB any and every single anti-Hillary "story" that she saw on her FB page, because it "validated" her anger and disbelief.

[bettyellen]

5. I saw a thing on google- they created genuine looking new sites w bullshit articles

And fake front pages and then had bots boost it to the top of google news results. In many cases, you had to get to the third page of google results to find any actual news originization covering it. They would often use large cities and conventional names so it wouldn’t be obvious it was a made up “journal”- like Los Angeles Post or Kansas City Inquirer. And then they’d beat Googles algoryhims against allowing the same site to stay at the top of their results by changing the URL and having it retweeted everywhere, so these sites would dominate for days longer than a real site ever could! All legal, I suppose, but scary in the many pronged assault on us all.
Many otherwise intelligent people fell for it.

[ehrnst]

8. Yep, but try and tell that to the person who latched onto it as gospel.

When it was pointed out to that person that the Observer was a Kushner publication, this scientist friend said that the source wasn't important.

When I posited a hypothetical situation of Chelsea Clinton's husband publishing a story that cast Bernie in a negative light, and asked what her response to THAT would be, she was silent.

[bettyellen]

10. Well Im talking about totally fictitious newspapers that dont exist. Hopefully that will be a

Thing of the past once people learn that went on. Yeah, people need to be called out for the bullshit, even if Trump has patented the phrase, fake news.

[dhol82]

2. I noticed a long time ago that the posts that got forwarded were the ones with

the bold capitalization, the multi color exclamation points, the hype, the call to fear and salaciousness.
Tried to inform senders that this was highly suspicious but they just never got it.
My email and FB acquaintances have been whittled down significantly.

[Hortensis]

3. This started in the '70s with advertising techniques.

That's over 40 years of intensive investment by very wealthy archconservatives in harnessing every technological and psychological advance to persuade Americans to support hard-right ideas and enable their evil schemes.

"...false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does..." This was known 2000 years ago.

We MUST have legal controls. The answer isn't battling basic human nature.

[Comatose Sphagetti]

6. "We MUST have legal controls."

Yep.

[procon]

7. It's the same paradox that made "The Big Lie" so effective as a Nazi propaganda technique.

"Fake news" is just the latest iteration of this practice, modernized through digital media and weaponized to maximum effectiveness that the Nazi could only dream about. Now anyone has the ability to take a known falsehood and spread it out through the internet so it gets repeatedly linked and cross referenced by multiple sources until it literally takes on a life of its own and becomes an alternative truth. As a perceived "fact", and "The Big Lie" or "Fake news", grows more powerful than the real thing because most people are critically questioning its flawed logic.

[kentuck]

9. The "Big Lie" is broken down into a million little pieces...

...with the use of Twitter.

It is human nature to believe the most ridiculous and most absurd over the boring truth.