Why fake news and hoaxes goes viral
Nature Human Behaviour
2017년6월27일
Limited individual attention and information overload could explain why low quality information, such as fake news and hoaxes, spreads virally on social media, concludes a paper published online this week in Nature Human Behaviour. Understanding the reasons why fake news goes viral is crucial to developing new tools for controlling the spread of false information.
Previous research has shown that a combination of social network structure and finite attention are sufficient for viral memes to emerge. Although it might seem logical that information quality plays a role in determining which information goes viral, the spread of misinformation of fake news on social media sites suggests otherwise.
Diego Fregolente Mendes de Oliveira and colleagues demonstrate that behavioural limitations reduce the ability of social media platforms to discriminate between low and high quality information. In this study, the authors develop a meme (transmissible piece of information or idea) diffusion model to explore how information load (average number of memes received by an individual per unit of time) and individual attention interact with the quality of a meme to affect its popularity. They find that it is theoretically possible to have a social media marketplace where a good trade-off between quality and diversity of information is achieved. However, when the model is calibrated with real-world measures of information load and attention derived from Twitter and Tumblr, they find that high and low quality information are shared at similar rates.
The authors conclude that one way to increase the discriminative power of social media and to prevent the spread of misinformation is to curb the use of bots that flood social media with low quality information.
doi: 10.1038/s41562-017-0132
리서치 하이라이트
-
7월1일
Criminology: Predicting police enforcement bias in major US citiesNature Human Behaviour
-
7월1일
Space health: The path of most resistance could help limit bone loss during spaceflightScientific Reports
-
6월30일
Microbiology: Transmission of gastrointestinal viruses in salivaNature
-
6월29일
COVID-19: Assessing instances of long COVID in UK health dataNature Communications
-
6월24일
Sport science: New wearable sensor to measure neck strain may detect potential concussionScientific Reports
-
6월23일
Scientific community: Women credited less than men in scientific paper authorshipNature