MIT scientist charts fake news reach
An MIT researcher hopes his study of fake news will encourage other scholars to take a closer look at why humans seem hard-wired to spread false news online and seek out ways to nudge people toward the truth.
Data scientist Soroush Vosoughi’s work, published last week in Science, examined 126,000 “rumor cascades” of stories shared by 3 million people and found that the true stories took six times longer to reach 1,500 people than the fake ones, with false political stories going deeper, broader and ultimately reaching more people.
Vosoughi is now calling on researchers to pick up where he left off and dig into why people seem predisposed to share fake news. Researchers could, for example, do neural imaging to see what’s being triggered inside people’s brains when they see a viral fake news post to better understand what can be done to help.
“If you think of this study as what the problem is, I think the next step is to clearly think about what we can do about it,” he said. “Run behavior intervention experiments to see if we can dampen the spread of misinformation. Can we do things that could make people less likely to want to retweet something that’s false?”
Gordon Pennycook, a Yale University psychology post-doc who contributed to an article accompanying the study, said Twitter’s and Facebook’s capacity to spread rumors is built into its DNA.
“It’s almost a kind of natural consequence,” Pennycook said. “It’s far easier to create falsehoods than to debunk them.”
He said society needs “something that would change the way they interact with social media to be more thoughtful” — a prescription he acknowledged is a tall task.
Fake news has always been with us, from stories in the 1800s of people setting foot on the moon to the grocery store tabloids flashing scoops on aliens. The problem we are facing, Pennycook said, is that people going through the checkout aisle know the supermarket tabloids aren’t hard, vetted news — but on Twitter and Facebook everything looks the same.
The study factored out the impact of online bots and also found the fake news epidemic wasn’t tied to how many followers a user had. Responses to false news stories online prompted surprise and disgust, whereas replies to true stories evoked sadness, anticipation, joy and trust.
“It is pointing toward psychological reasons. Even before the internet and social media, people would spread gossip around the water cooler or barbecue,” Vosoughi said. “What social media and internet has done is it has made it easy for these bad parts of human nature and the good parts of human nature to be amplified.”