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How Fake News Goes Viral
Hat tip - AMAC's magazine [Scientific American] NASA runs a child-slave colony on Mars!Photos taken by a Chinese orbiter reveal an alien settlement on the moon! Shape-shifting reptilian extraterrestrials that can control human minds are running the U.S. government! What drives the astonishing popularity of such stories? Are we a particularly gullible species? Perhaps not—maybe we’re just overwhelmed. A bare-bones model of how news spreads on social media, published in June in Nature Human Behavior, indicates that just about anything can go viral. Even in a perfect world, where everyone wants to share real news and is capable of evaluating the veracity of every claim, some fake news would still reach thousands (or even millions) of people, simply because of information overload. It is often impossible to see everything that comes into one’s news feed, let alone confirm it. In disease models, highly connected people are called "superspreaders" because they help drive epidemics. By examining the behavior of actual Twitter users, however, she demonstrated in 2016 that superconnected agents pass on very few of the memes they receive. This is because they cannot possibly see, let alone read, everything in their staggeringly lengthy feeds. "People who are highly connected are unlikely to see anything that is even five minutes old because it is so far down their feed," she notes. Thus information overload ensures they are less likely to get infected in the first place. In her view, hubs suppress the vast majority of memes but may help to spread the few they let through. Also playing a role in virality: friends tend to form clusters. So, for instance, because Alice knows Bob and Clive, the latter likely know each other as well, and likely share similar views on many issues. These clusters help establish what social media aficionados think of as an "echo chamber." Most of us tend to see some memes several times, increasing the likelihood that we too will share them. Making matters worse, the contagiousness of a meme—unlike that of a flu virus—depends on how often it has been shared. In a Web-based experiment involving more than 14,000 volunteers, sociologist Matthew Salganik, then at Columbia University, and others showed in 2006 that recruits were much more likely to download a particular song if they were aware that their peers liked it. Such "social reinforcement" can ensure that contagiousness increases sharply once a certain threshold of exposure is crossed. "You see one person post, ’NASA’s got slave colonies on Mars,’ and you think, ’That’s ridiculous,’" Porter explains. "You see a second person post, ’NASA’s got slave colonies on Mars.’ You see this many times, and it somehow becomes more plausible the more times you see it." And so you share it, too. Several research groups are exploring the intricate cognitive processes that lead to one meme being chosen over another. Posted by: Flater Gloluse1367 2021-02-11 |
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