Feels like somebody's playing hardball:
Study reveals the key reason why fake news spreads on social media
Jan 2023, phys.org
It's the algorithm, stupid. And specifically, algorithms that prioritize engagement:
Upends popular misconceptions that misinformation spreads because users lack the critical thinking skills necessary for discerning truth from falsehood or because their strong political beliefs skew their judgment.15% of the most habitual news sharers in the research were responsible for spreading about 30% to 40% of the fake news."Due to the reward-based learning systems on social media, users form habits of sharing information that gets recognition from others," the researchers wrote. "Once habits form, information sharing is automatically activated by cues on the platform without users considering critical response outcomes, such as spreading misinformation."
The study's conclusions:
- Habitual sharing of misinformation is not inevitable.
- Users could be incentivized to build sharing habits that make them more sensitive to sharing truthful content.
- Effectively reducing misinformation would require restructuring the online environments that promote and support its sharing.
And the best conclusion:
"These findings suggest that social media platforms can take a more active step than moderating what information is posted and instead pursue structural changes in their reward structure to limit the spread of misinformation."
Public Service Announcement:
Business will never do something unless it increases profits, because unlike humans who need air and water and food to live, business needs only profits. Business will never do something that directly inhibits its own profit-generating activities. In this case, social media makes money from "engaging users". To expect them to stop would be to expect a starving mother not to steal food for her children. Government, and regulation, is the immune system of society. In our attempts to maintain the human race as a species, unregulated business is a parasite, not a partner.
via University of Southern California: Gizem Ceylan et al, Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216614120
True stories can win out on social media, study finds
Feb 2023, phys.org
"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on." Or at least that's how the saying goes. That's what we thought back in 2018 when we heard the same thing from MIT's Laboratory for Social Machines
It turns out that only held true for Twitter; on Reddit they found the opposite.
The difference? Twitter has no moderators.
And who can blame them; for that kind of money?!
Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone (June 2022)
via The Ohio State University: Robert M Bond et al, Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit, PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad018
Unrelated image credit: AI Art - Tony Montana Eating a Falafel - 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment