The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has concluded the largest study to date on the spread of online fake news. And it isn’t good news.
The study tracked the spread of a staggering 126,000 different rumours on social network Twitter, spanning 11 years (2006-2016) to see how they performed when compared to their truthful counterparts.
The result; fake news stories outperformed accurate news stories in every single metric. They travelled faster. They travelled deeper, and they reached more people. In the simplest terms, fake news enjoys more success on social media than accurate news. Even when “bots” were taken out of the equation.
Firstly, to clear up some terminology. By fake news stories, we are not referring to the Trump-era meaning of fake news that colloquially refers to news you don’t agree with, or news from a source you don’t like. The study tracked bona-fide fake stories. Spoof news. Satire mistaken for truth. Nonsense stories posing as satire to lure clicks. Clickbait. Conspiracy theories. Deceitful propaganda. Or just plain old fake stories. Whatever sub-category they fall into, the common theme is that the stories in the study were entirely, or almost entirely, made up. Fiction.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information” said Soroush Vosoughi, one of the study’s lead scientists at MIT.
There are many different reasons why people online share fake news stories, of course. Many social media users have admitted to intentionally sharing fake stories to promote a particular narrative, while many (most) genuinely believed the story was real but didn’t fact check the story or the source.
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Fake stories are typically specifically deigned to travel faster and quicker across social media. They do that by evoking core emotions in the reader, essentially manipulating human nature. Studies have consistently found that we are more likely to share stories that make us, for example, angry or happy. Fake news taps into that, in a way that accurate news rarely can. The MIT team also found that fake news stories can appear “novel”, substantially different than other stories shared or seen by a particular social media user, which makes them more likely to be shared.
There are other factors that come into play, including a growing distrust and resentment of mainstream media, whether that is because of errors in their reporting or creeping political biases, which in effect push people into believing stories from “alternative” sources and making us more willing to believe them.
Given that the study covered the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in the US, it may come as no surprise that the most popularly shared fake news category were politically-themed rumours. However fake news outperformed accurate news on every single subject, including technology, urban legends and science.
A group of political scientists, in response to the study, wrote that ”we must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century”.
It is difficult to predict what this will mean going into the future, since this is completely unprecedented. Never before has fake news reached so many people in such a quick amount of time.
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It has become clear that we need changes in the way information is treated and shared on the Internet, where differing opinions or viewpoints are welcomed but objective truth is always prioritised, without committing censorship or creating “arbiters of truth”.
A future where we cannot decipher between fact and fiction is not a good future for anyone, regardless of your viewpoints, philosophies or where you fall on the political spectrum. We all have a common duty and responsibility to ensure that the information we trust and share online is accurate. It is important for all of us to fact-check the information we share online, and the sources from where that information comes from.