How can we fight back against the fake news infecting
our information feeds and political systems? New research suggests
that education and filtering technology might not be enough: The
very nature of social media networks could be making us peculiarly
vulnerable.
The intentional spreading of false stories has been
credited with swaying such monumental events as last year’s Brexit
vote and United States presidential election.
Tech firms such as Google and Facebook have been trying
to find ways to weed it out, or at least help users spot it.
Some say we need to start earlier, educating children
on how to think critically. But understanding the unique
epidemiology of fake news may be no less important.
Unlike a typical virus, purveyors of falsehood do not
have to infect people at random.
Thanks to the wealth of information available on social
media and the advent of targeted advertising, they can go straight
for the most susceptible and valuable victims — those most likely
to spread the infection.
This insight emerges from a recent study by network
theorists Christoph Aymanns, Jakob Foerster and Co-Pierre Georg,
who ran computer simulations of the way fake news moves through
social networks.
Using state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms,
they examined how individuals might learn to recognise false news,
and sought to identify the most important factors in helping fake
news spread.
They found that the most important catalyst of fake
news was the precision with which the purveyor targeted an audience
— a task that can easily be accomplished using the data that tech
companies routinely gather and sell to advertisers.
The key was to seed an initial cluster of believers,
who would share or comment on the item, recommending it to others
through Twitter or Facebook.
False stories spread further when they were initially
aimed at poorly informed people who had a hard time telling if a
claim was true or false.
Hence, we have unwittingly engineered a social media
environment that is inherently prone to fake news epidemics.
When marketers use information on surfing habits,
opinions and social connections to aim ads at people with just the
right interests, this can facilitate beneficial economic
exchange.
But in the wrong hands, the technology becomes a means
for the precision seeding of propaganda.
It is hard to see how this can change without altering
the advertising-centric business model of social media.
Mr Aymanns suggests that big social media companies
could counteract fake news by preventing advertisers from targeting
users on the basis of political views, or even by suspending all
targeted ads during election campaigns. But this might be
impossible, given how important such advertising has become to the
economy.
Alternatively, opponents of fake news could use the
same targeting technology to identify and educate the most
vulnerable people — say, providing them with links to information
that might help them avoid being fooled.
The study does offer one positive conclusion: Broad
awareness of fake news should tend to work against its success.
Campaigns were much less successful when individuals in
the model learned strategies to recognise falsehoods while being
fully aware that purveyors were active. This suggests that public
information campaigns can work, as Facebook’s seemed to do ahead of
the French election in May.
In other words, fake news is like a weaponised
infectious agent. Immunisation through education can help, but it
might not be a comprehensive defence. BLOOMBERG
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