“A Gorilla learns how to knit,” “A German street is covered in chocolate after a leak from a chocolate factory,” and “NASA is installing internet on the moon.” Can you tell which of these statements is real and which is false?
Fake news can be understood as information that is published on the internet which aesthetically resembles valid news content but is fabricated or inaccurate. Fake news and misinformation have been one of the most pressing issues in many countries all over the world. Recent years have seen a significant rise in the amount of misinformation being spread across the globe. Social media has become a platform for sharing fake news. The internet has made it possible to publish and share information that is unverified and has minimal regulation or editorial standards. According to Martina Chapman (a media literacy expert), fake news has three elements, which are, mistrust, misinformation and manipulation.
A research study talks about the factors that make people believe fake news. Why people find it difficult to differentiate between true and false news can be understood through the dual process theory of reasoning. According to the System 2 (slow, deliberate and logical thinking) account of thinking, people who think carefully about information will be more likely to differentiate between true and fake news. Stopping and thinking about the relevant prior knowledge before believing in the information one reads is a critical factor in determining the veracity of the information. For example, having basic scientific knowledge is positively associated with truth discernment for misinformation about COVID-19. Another reason can be the use of heuristics or mental shortcuts. The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe an information to be true after repeated exposure of false information. Thus, processing fluency and feelings of familiarity might contribute to the increased belief in false news.
Another recent study has found that timing is an important factor when correcting fake news. Fact-checks that are provided immediately after having reduced the misclassification of headlines. A support for the concurrent storage hypothesis suggests that people retain both misinformation and its correction but over time, the correction fades from memory. Thus, providing fact-checks immediately after the exposure of information was more effective rather than providing them during the exposure of information thus, emphasizing the power of feedback in boosting memory.
Research understanding the association between the dark side of social media use and the sharing of fake news found that online trust, self-disclosure, fear of missing out, and social media fatigue were positively associated with sharing fake news on social media. However, social comparison was negatively associated with sharing misinformation. It was also observed that online trust was negatively associated with validating the news before sharing.
In a study, participants had to evaluate the truthfulness of news articles in two languages, native (Polish) and foreign (English). The researchers found that if an individual uses a foreign language, it disrupts their ability to differentiate true from false news. It had been found that when one uses their foreign language, true news was judged as less believable and on the other hand, false news was judged to be more believable. This decrease in one’s ability to discern true from false news has been observed in individuals with adequate language proficiency and thus, it cannot be attributed to low comprehension of news. This makes any immigrant population extremely vulnerable and likely to be misinformed, according to the authors of the study.
Most people do not want to share fake news. It has been found that people who rely on their intuition and emotions usually fall for fake news because they don’t think enough about what information they are reading. The reason why this might happen is because, on social media people generally scroll through information and are overwhelmed by a lot of information presented to them all at once. Having a subtle shift in attention can be helpful in fixing the problem and counter the spread of misinformation online.
A study further showed that simply being asked about the accuracy of the information to the participants improved the quality of links and news that was shared by them on twitter. It was further found that there was no association between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions. This suggests that people may not have a firm belief in what they share. Usually, people on social media quickly scroll through various types of serious as well as emotionally engaging content and send posts and links without actually reading them carefully. Once shared, users also receive quick social feedback on their posts through likes and comments. This design of social media platforms discourage people from reflecting on the accuracy of news. However, a simple intervention that can be used by social media platforms is to ask the users to rate the accuracy of randomly selected headlines. This would bring a shift in people’s attention to the accuracy of the information. An approach like this, could potentially increase the quality of news that is being shared online.
In what is being famously called the “post-truth era,” it has become very important to curb the spread of fake news. Spread of misinformation about politics, climate change, the coronavirus or many other areas, leads to incorrect beliefs among individuals about the concerned topic and also creates unnecessary panic and anxiety among the public. Therefore, it is important to fact-check information from reliable sources or stop and think before believing and sharing any information on social media.
Nikita Mehta
