Truth decayA Remedy for the Spread of False News?

Stopping the spread of political misinformation on social media may seem like an impossible task. But a new study co-authored by MIT scholars finds that most people who share false news stories online do so unintentionally, and that their sharing habits can be modified through reminders about accuracy.

When such reminders are displayed, it can increase the gap between the percentage of true news stories and false news stories that people share online, as shown in online experiments that the researchers developed.

“Getting people to think about accuracy makes them more discerning in their sharing, regardless of ideology,” says MIT Professor David Rand, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results. “And it translates into a scalable and easily implementable intervention for social media platforms.”

The study also indicates why people share false information online. Among people who shared a set of false news stories used in the study, around 50 percent did so because of inattention, related to the hasty way people use social media; another 33 percent were mistaken about the accuracy of the news they saw and shared it because they (incorrectly) thought it was true; and about 16 percent knowingly shared false news headlines.

“Our results suggest that the large majority of people across the ideological spectrum want to share only accurate content,” says Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT Sloan’s Human Cooperation Laboratory and Applied Cooperation Team. “It’s not like most people are just saying, ‘I know this is false and I don’t care.’”

The paper, “Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online,” is being published today in Nature. In addition to Rand, the co-authors are Gordon Pennycook, an assistant professor at the University of Regina; Ziv Epstein, a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab; Mohsen Mosleh, a lecturer at the University of Exeter Business School and a research affiliate at MIT Sloan; Antonio Arechar, a research associate at MIT Sloan; and Dean Eckles, the Mitsubishi Career Development Professor and an associate professor of marketing at MIT Sloan.