Why Fake News Spreads so Rapidly––A Scientific Take
The effect of social media on the spread of information has long been studied, whether it revolves around platforms, algorithms, or users. One specific phenomenon observed in countless scenarios indicates that, on social media platforms, fake (or false) news spreads to more people and at a much higher rate than real news. But why is this?
According to multiple studies, including ones from Scientific American and MIT, a post's ability to go viral (ie. seen by many people) depends mostly on sharing. The Scientific American paper describes such sharing networks as "clusters," where people forward posts to others in their social circle after viewing them.
There are many intuitive reasons for why false news may spread faster in this manner. False news is often exaggerated, shocking, or strongly appealing to a certain opinion. On the other hand, real news may be viewed as less interesting or less conforming to a strong belief. Given that, false news often wins the tug-of-war to capture a user's attention.
However, a post's ability to go viral depends on more than just attention-grabbing. According to one study, where 126,000 posts were analyzed for falsities (through algorithms like factcheck.org and politifact.com), most covered political content and had some sort of a "shock" factor. Researchers attributed this case to a desire for sharing novel info with others––psychologically, humans feel satisfaction in discovering and being able to connect through new, interesting information.
Considering the observations stated above, it is also reasonable to infer that as false news continues to spread rapidly, reposts become increasingly common, enabling false news to appear on users' feeds more than once. This creates a chain-reaction effect––the "illusory truth effect", as described by Vanderbilt University's research column, states that seeing a claim multiple times increases its overall believability significantly. This means that after viewing misinformation multiple times, it is even more likely that a user will share it forward.
Over time, these patterns accumulate to form an exponential increase in the spread of false news, facilitated by a variety of psychological and algorithmic factors. It is exceedingly important, now more than ever, that we are skeptical of the claims we see on the Internet––especially with the widespread growth of AI, which enables false content to be generated with ease.
Always remember: check before you share.
Credits:
Dizikes, Peter. “Study: On Twitter, False News Travels Faster Than True Stories.” MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 8 Mar. 2018, https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308.
MIT Sloan Office of Communications. “Why Do People Around the World Share Fake News? New Research Finds Commonalities in Global Behavior | MIT Sloan.” 29 June 2023.
Mukerjee, Madhusree. “How Fake News Goes Viral&Mdash;Here&Rsquo;S the Math.” Scientific American, 14 July 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fake-news-goes-viral-mdash-heres-the-math/.
Oct. 6, et al. “Study Shows That Repeated Statements Are More Often Judged to Be True, Regardless of a Person’s Age or Prior Knowledge.” Vanderbilt University, 6 Oct. 2020, https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2020/10/06/study-shows-that-repeated-statements-are-more-often-judged-to-be-true-regardless-of-a-persons-age-or-prior-knowledge/.
