Fake News, Professionally Described

Why are fake news so popular?

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim that people spread fake news because of them being something new and interesting. The emotions of resentment and the shock factor that fake news produce are much greater than the emotion of happiness, confidence or sadness, that we experience hearing real news. In the past few years, with the help of multiple algorithms and automated robot’s fake news have spread much faster than before.

In the year 2018, MIT published a study regarding fake news. The study took place on a social media platform called Twitter, where they have examined 126 thousand posts, that have been published between 2006 and 2017. These social media posts have been shared by a whopping 3 million users. Results have shown, that the spread of fake news are much faster and reach a much wider audience than their genuine counterparts. The research also shows that fake news has been shared by 70% more users than real news. Whilst fake news has reached between one thousand and 100 thousand users, in general, genuine information rarely got to a thousand persons.

Most of the studies regarding misinformation, fake news and propaganda use information attainable from online platforms. Contrary to Facebook and Instagram, on Twitter every content is public. Although you cannot take Twitter users as a representative sample, because of its unpopularity in Middle and Eastern Europe. Romania’s main source of information is the television, thus, in this country, you need to take in consideration what information and how are they brought to you by these news outlets.

Where do fake news come from? Fake news can develop because of a lack of information, personal opinion, ignorance or simply because a person’s malice. False news distributors can be similarly well-meaning and ill-intentioned people. They can also come from real and trustworthy sources. This usually happens when the authors are not attentive enough and they misspell something.

How to make the internet a safer place? Distribution of fake news is not considered a crime, unless it has a serious consequence. Some researches find that changing user behaviour is a good way to stop the spread of fake news. For example, labeling contents that contain false news, incentives for people who spread genuine information on social media platform. Automated bots or the erasure of certain content is not a sustainable solution. New bots, new fake news portals and new user profiles can be created easily. In the current system of the press overproducing content is kind of a rule. ‘Cleaning up’ would require huge of amounts of human and technological resources. Media education seems to be a good solution for interventions that change user behaviour. Media education can be mastered at almost any age. It would be ideal if future readers would learn about these things in school. They would learn about critical thinking in order to not take every piece of information for granted. The school would teach them how to assess the authenticity of the source, by fact-checking and researching about certain topics. Thus they can choose themselves to believe in what they have read or not.

In most cases, a simple inspection of the source can tell you if the information in a certain article is real or not. We should always investigate sources that are not so popular or sources that are unknown to us. If the URL is something strange sounding or it’s extensions are suspicious, the webpage itself cannot be trusted.

Source: https://atlatszo.ro/szabad-sajto/media/mit-mond-a-tudomany-az-alhirekrol/