We love novelty. The unusual, the strange, the odd — whatever you want to call it, people want news that is startling to read. Newspapers have always known this, which is why we had Yellow Journalism and why tabloids are popular with readers.
Nobody is surprised by the headline, “Politician accepts donation from like-minded supporter.” That’s not news. But twist the headline a bit and you have news. “Billionaire seeks influence through donations to politician.” Data show that politicians tend to have a position and then accept money; it is more interesting to believe politicians are bought and paid for by secretly scheming power brokers.
It’s a short step from almost-believable conspiracy theories to complete wing-nut conspiracies and fake news.
The fake news has an eager and willing audience, researchers have demonstrated. We want to believe the unbelievable, because it supports our biases.
Here is the New York Times report on this research.
It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame.
By STEVE LOHRMARCH 8, 2018Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined true and false news stories posted on Twitter from the social network’s founding in 2006 through 2017.
What if the scourge of false news on the internet is not the result of Russian operatives or partisan zealots or computer-controlled bots? What if the main problem is us?
People are the principal culprits, according to a new study examining the flow of stories on Twitter. And people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.
As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news.
It isn’t just political biases that lead us to embrace and share fake news. No, we share the novel stories about business, science, and technology, too. I’ve seen this time and time again with stories on genetically modified foods, cell phone radiation, vaccines, and social media. No matter the topic, the weirdest stories end up being shared on social media.
The researchers, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that those patterns applied to every subject they studied, not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science and technology.
False claims were 70 percent more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter. True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people. And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.
This was not a small-scale study, either.
The research, published on Thursday in Science magazine, examined true and false news stories posted on Twitter from the social network’s founding in 2006 through 2017. The study’s authors tracked 126,000 stories tweeted by roughly three million people more than 4.5 million times. “News” and “stories” were defined broadly — as claims of fact — regardless of the source. And the study explicitly avoided the term “fake news,” which, the authors write, has become “irredeemably polarized in our current political and media climate.”
The stories were classified as true or false, using information from six independent fact-checking organizations including Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. To ensure that their analysis held up in general — not just on claims that drew the attention of fact-checking groups — the researchers enlisted students to annotate as true or false more than 13,000 other stories that circulated on Twitter. Again, a tilt toward falsehood was clear.
It would seem obvious enough, but scholars of rhetoric and persuasion need to admit that novelty applies to fiction by its nature. A fabricated story is more likely to be novel than a true story. Regardless of our clichés, the truth is rarely stranger than fiction. A lot of clickbait online isn’t true because the lies get traffic.
Novelty wins retweets
The M.I.T. researchers pointed to factors that contribute to the appeal of false news. Applying standard text-analysis tools, they found that false claims were significantly more novel than true ones — maybe not a surprise, since falsehoods are made up.
For scholars of rhetoric, psychology, and fields such as behavioral economics, we want to know if we can teach students to resist these stories. Can we fight against the clickbait and fake news? The answer is… probably not without some assistance. Either artificial intelligence or human editors or a combination of both will need to tag fake stories as falsehoods. Someone will need to highlight the untruths and outright fabrications. Even then, people with biases will assume that a story marked “False” was marked by someone for nefarious reasons. In other words, identifying fake news might only strengthen the spread of that news among some people.
What can be done?
The M.I.T. researchers said that understanding how false news spreads is a first step toward curbing it. They concluded that human behavior plays a large role in explaining the phenomenon, and mention possible interventions, like better labeling, to alter behavior.For all the concern about false news, there is little certainty about its influence on people’s beliefs and actions. A recent study of the browsing histories of thousands of American adults in the months before the 2016 election found that false news accounted for only a small portion of the total news people consumed. “We have to be very careful about making the inference that fake news has a big impact,” said Duncan Watts, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research.
Another author of the M.I.T. study, Deb Roy, former chief media scientist at Twitter, is engaged in a project to improve the health of the information ecosystem. In fall 2016, Mr. Roy, an associate professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, became a founder and the chairman of Cortico, a nonprofit that is developing tools to measure public conversations online to gauge attributes like shared attention, variety of opinion and receptivity. The idea is that improving the ability to measure such attributes would lead to better decision-making that would counteract misinformation.
Mr. Roy acknowledged the challenge in trying to not only alter individual behavior but also in enlisting the support of big internet platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, and media companies.
“Polarization,” he said, “has turned out to be a great business model.”
Media rely on divisions. Tech media depend on Apple vs. Windows or Intel vs. AMD. The sports media have natural stories of conflict. Political stories are all about us versus them. The fake news phenomenon isn’t new. People have always embraced stories that glorified their tribe and vilified the other. It was a business model for Hearst newspapers and a model for talk radio since the 1970s.
Fake news is here to stay because it didn’t first appear in 2016.