One explanation is what Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and I called the novelty hypothesis. But if humans are the objects of fake news campaigns, and if they are so critical to their spread, why are we so attracted to fake news? And why do we share it? Bots are just a vehicle to achieve an end. These deeply human decisions are the very object of fake news manipulation. It's humans who vote, protest, boycott products, and decide whether to vaccinate their kids. Misleading humans is the ultimate goal of any misinformation campaign. In the end, humans and machines play symbiotic roles in the spread of falsity: bots manipulate humans to share fake news, and humans spread it on through the Hype Machine. In their study from 2016 to 2017, Menczer and his colleagues also found that humans, not bots, were the most critical spreaders of fake news in the Twitter network. In our ten-year study with Twitter, we found that it was humans, more than bots, that helped make false rumors spread faster and more broadly than the truth. It was Trump who adopted the false claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election as an official talking point.īut bots can't spread fake news without people. Donald Trump, for example, has on a number of occasions shared content from known bots, legitimizing their content and spreading their misinformation widely in the Twitter network. The strategy works when influential people are fooled into sharing the content. Menczer and his colleagues point to an example in their data in which a single bot mentioned (the president's Twitter handle) nineteen times, linking to the false news claim that millions of votes were cast by illegal immigrants in the 2016 presidential election. If they can get an influential human to retweet fake news, it simultaneously amplifies and legitimizes it. Second, bots mention influential humans incessantly. The early tweeting activity by bots triggers a disproportionate amount of human engagement, creating cascades of fake news triggered by bots but propagated by humans through the Hype Machine's network. What happens next validates the effectiveness of this strategy, because humans do most of the retweeting. And the initial spreaders of a fake news article are much more likely to be bots than humans. įirst, bots pounce on fake news in the first few seconds after it's published, and they retweet it broadly. But the way bots worked to amplify fake news was surprising, and it highlights the sophistication with which they are programmed to prey on the Hype Machine , the ever-expanding social media ecosystem that has blanketed the planet over the last ten years. They also found that bots played a big role in spreading content from low-credibility sources. Their work corroborated the finding, from our ten-year study of misinformation on Twitter, that fake news was more viral than real news. They analyzed 14 million tweets spreading 400,000 articles on Twitter in 20. In 2018 my friend and colleague Filippo Menczer at Indiana University, along with his colleagues Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, and Alessandro Flammini, published the largest-ever study on how social bots spread fake news. Understanding our contributions to this symbiotic process is essential to fighting fake news. If we only focus on bots, we'll miss the bigger picture and our own role in the spread of misinformation. In reality, fake news spreads through a fascinating symbiosis between bots and humans. Social bots, meaning software-controlled social media profiles, are a big part of how fake news spreads online and the way they are used to spread lies is both disturbing and fascinating. Published by Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Adapted from " THE HYPE MACHINE: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health-and How We Must Adapt" by Sinan Aral.
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