Annotated Bibliography on the spread of true and false news online
Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. “The spread of true and false news online.” Science 359.6380 (2018): 1146-1151.
The report acknowledges the fact that lies spread way faster than the truth, hence the concern over fake news and its overall influence in people’s social, economic and political well-being. This report aimed at understanding how false news is spread in the social media platform, especially twitter by taking into account rumours spread from 2006 to 2017. While social media happens to be critical in many people’s lives in regards to the spread and access to information, Vosoughi et. al. admits that little is known on their resulting contribution in the spread of rumours and falsity online. Therefore, this report answers two important questions; how do truth and falsity diffuse differently? What factors of human judgment explains these differences? Notably, the report refrains from the term fake news and this is attributed to the polarization as in today’s media and political climate where news sources that do not support such politicians are deemed fake and unreliable. While it is true the term has lost its veracity, the report encompasses the phrases true and false news. Rumours in twitter begin when users draft assertions on a topic and it is spread through retweeting (diffusion process) protecting the singularity of the origin of the tweet. By incorporating a comprehensive data set of cascaded twitter rumours (2006-2017), the report investigated the variance as either true, false or mixed stories. Statistically, 126,000 rumours were spread and reached over three million people, 4.5 million times. The study incorporated six fact-checking independent organizations: factcheck.org, urbanlegends.about.com, truthorfiction.com, snopes.com, politifact.com, and hoax-slayer.com. Who analyzed and reported the investigated rumours relevant to this study. This is followed by quantification of the depths, analysis of the size of users involved and a measure of structural vitality to determine the extent of attention and broadcast received. On analyzing the Dynamics, it is evident that falsehood depicted a broader, deeper, faster and farther diffusion in virtually all categories when compared to information deemed true news. Evidently, false news was found to reach a wider audience between 1000-100,000 people, while true news reached less than 1000 people at a time. Besides, false political news received comparative attention as it reached many people and it’s vitality way broader than any other false news as it diffused quickly and deeper. It is estimated that over 20,000 people read or received false political news compared to the 10,000 people who received other forms of fake news. A further investigation on the likelihood of retweeting was concluded that users were 70% more likely to retweet false news as opposed to true news independent of the number of followees and followers, activity level as well as the age and verification of the account. With novelty being an important component of human understanding, the report found false news as being more novel when compared to true stories, although users may have different and contradicting perception of the information therein.