We fight against fake news every day. But a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now shows that fake news spreads faster than real news.
Anyone who corrects misinformation on social networks only makes things worse. Because this is how even worse nonsense is spread, as researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say. They studied the microblogging service Twitter and found that the creators of fake news made even more toxic tweets after they were politely corrected.
Significantly lower quality
study MIT focused on a field experiment in which a team offered polite corrections with links to solid evidence in response to obviously false tweets about politics. “It wasn’t encouraging. After being corrected, a user retweeted messages that were significantly lower quality and more biased,” Mohsen Mosleh, co-author and lecturer at the University of Exeter Business School . In addition, the retweets were written in more toxic language.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers first identified 2,000 Twitter users with apparently different political beliefs who had spread one of eleven frequently repeated fake news stories. All of these articles were debunked by Snopes , an online portal that detects fake news.
Examples include the false claims that Ukraine donated more money than any other nation to the Clinton Foundation and that Donald Trump evicted a disabled combat veteran from his rental apartment for owning a therapy dog. Twitter bot accounts that the researchers had previously created responded to these claims. At the time of the experiment, they had already existed for three months and had at least 1,000 followers, so they looked like real accounts.
A vicious cycle is triggered
When the bots spotted one of the 11 false claims, they responded by saying they weren't sure if the claim was correct. In any case, Snopes shows that they are fake. They sent the relevant links along with it. Reply tweets within 24 hours contained new errors and demonstrated entrenched one-sided opinions. “We could have expected that a correction would lead to rethinking the information,” says MIT professor David G. Rand, also a co-author of the study. Instead, a public correction by another user seems to divert people's attention from the accuracy.
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Source: press release
Also interesting:
An alleged letter from the Federal Ministry of Health is currently doing the rounds, which is marked “For internal use only”. This supposedly comes from the Federal Ministry of Health in Germany.
Notes:
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