Truth decayThe ruse of “fake news”
As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing. Researchers want to use science to combat techniques that can make the true seem false, and the reverse.
As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing.
Reports of foreign influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election are only the most high-profile example of how the infusion of misinformation into social media can influence democratic institutions. Determining how to measure and counter untruths in the digital age, however, is still in its early stages.
In a recent study described in the journal Science, lead authors Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and an associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and more than a dozen co-authors argue that a multidisciplinary effort is needed to understand better how the internet spreads content and how readers process the news and information they consume.
Such broad-based efforts are necessary, the authors said, “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”
“There needs to be some regular auditing of what the platforms are doing and how much this information is spreading,” Lazer added, “because there is a collective interest in the quality of the information ecosystem that we all live in.”
The rise of fake news, the authors said, can be chalked up in part to two opposing trends in American society. Recent Gallup polls have found a growing mistrust of U.S. media, and studies have also said that nearly half of Americans “often or sometimes” get their news from social media, with Facebook being the dominant source.
While those platforms have enabled new information sources and voices to emerge, they have also made it far easier for people to engage only with homogeneous social networks and take in only information that affirms their own views, thereby exacerbating the ideological divides in the country.
“The internet has reduced many [previously enforced] constraints on dissemination of news. This allows outlets that do not embody these norms to compete online with those that do on a relatively more
