Houston, We May Want to Do Fake News
May 2, 2018
The fake news phenomenon might be in the public eye more, thanks to endless warnings and news stories, however that has not dulled its impact. In fact, this shadowy form of propaganda seems to flourish under the spotlight, according to a recent ScienceNews story, “On Twitter, The Lure of Fake News is Stronger than Truth.”
According to the research:
“Discussions of false stories tended to start from fewer original tweets, but some of those retweet chains then reached tens of thousands of users, while true news stories never spread to more than about 1,600 people. True news stories also took about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people. Overall, fake news was about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real news.”
That’s an interesting set of data. However, anyone quick to blame spambots for this amazing proliferation of fake news needs to give it a second look. According to research, bots are not as much to blame for this trend than humans. This is actually good news. Ideally, changes can be made on the personal level and we can eventually stamp out this misleading trend of fake news.
But if fake news “works”, why not use it? Not even humans can figure out what’s accurate, allegedly accurate, and sort of correct but not really. Smart software plus humans makes curation complex, slow, and costly.
That sounds about right or does it?
Patrick Roland, May 2, 2018
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