Fake news appear more real than you think
You’ve probably heard at some point that fake news on Twitter spread 70% faster than real news. (If not, here you go)
But what causes people to share seemingly obvious misinformation? Research discussed in this article reveals that fake news might be more real than you think — and that’s what makes them scary.
The illusion of credibility
Misinformation isn’t just big red circles and badly photo-shopped images. Rather, it’s the other way around:
The research article “Fake news zealots: Effect of perception of news on online sharing behavior” suggests that posts which appear the most credible are those with the most reactions (likes and comments).
Makes sense — you wouldn’t like something that you perceive as obviously false.
Ironically however, this leads to fake news getting the most reactions.
What does this mean? There is a dissonance between perceived and actual truthfulness. Another finding supports this idea:
“The veracity of a tweet negatively impacts its reaction likelihood.”
To understand this, let’s review the diagram:
1. Perceiving something as real news (1st blue point) leads to a relatively high reaction rate (y-axes)
2. Perceiving it as misleading or fake (2nd & 3rd blue point) leads to a low reaction rate
3. News being real leads to a low reaction rate (1st red point), while news being fake leads to the highest reaction rate (3rd point)
In other words: The engagement with misinformation on social media seems to be caused by how real they appear, not by being as obscure as possible.
A pinch of propaganda
These findings fit together with research in the field of artificial intelligence and disinformation detection.
To generate a dataset which mimics real-world fake news, researchers discovered that more than 55% of the analysed articles “contain inaccurate information mixed with correct information”.
In particular, these texts where factual for the most part, with just a few sentences containing disinformation. Again, this shows how fake news aren’t as fake as you might think.
Furthermore, the research paper Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article defines 18 techniques to use language as propaganda.
Interestingly, many of these techniques don’t directly alter the meaning of the text.
Take a look at the definition of “loaded language” for example:
Using words/phrases with strong emotional implications (positive or negative) to influence an audience (Weston, 2018, p. 6). Ex.: “[. . . ] a lone lawmaker’s childish shouting
No false information required. Yet these propaganda techniques can heavily impact the way information is perceived and motivate engagement through emotions.
To sum up:
- The engagement with misinformation on social media seems to be caused by how real they appear. However, information being real leads to less engagement.
- This could be explained by fake news often being mixed with real news and the use of propaganda techniques.
Thanks for reading and stay curious!
