How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 22, 2017 at 5:32:28 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media
> By BENEDICT CAREY
> Oct 20 2017
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/health/social-media-fake-news.html>
>
> Hours after the Las Vegas massacre, Travis McKinney’s Facebook feed was hit with a scattershot of conspiracy 
> theories. The police were lying. There were multiple shooters in the hotel, not just one. The sheriff was covering 
> for casino owners to preserve their business.
>
> The political rumors sprouted soon after, like digital weeds. The killer was anti-Trump, an “antifa” activist, said 
> some; others made the opposite claim, that he was an alt-right terrorist. The two unsupported narratives ran into the 
> usual stream of chatter, news and selfies.
>
> “This stuff was coming in from all over my network of 300 to 400” friends and followers, said Mr. McKinney, 52, of 
> Suffolk, Va., and some posts were from his inner circle.
>
> But he knew there was only one shooter; a handgun instructor and defense contractor, he had been listening to the 
> police scanner in Las Vegas with an app. “I jumped online and tried to counter some of this nonsense,” he said.
>
> In the coming weeks, executives from Facebook and Twitter will appear before congressional committees to answer 
> questions about the use of their platforms by Russian hackers and others to spread misinformation and skew elections. 
> During the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook sold more than $100,000 worth of ads to a Kremlin-linked company, and 
> Google sold more than $4,500 worth to accounts thought to be connected to the Russian government.
>
> Agents with links to the Russian government set up an endless array of fake accounts and websites and purchased a 
> slew of advertisements on Google and Facebook, spreading dubious claims that seemed intended to sow division all 
> along the political spectrum — “a cultural hack,” in the words of one expert.
>
> Yet the psychology behind social media platforms — the dynamics that make them such powerful vectors of 
> misinformation in the first place — is at least as important, experts say, especially for those who think they’re 
> immune to being duped. For all the suspicions about social media companies’ motives and ethics, it is the interaction 
> of the technology with our common, often subconscious psychological biases that makes so many of us vulnerable to 
> misinformation, and this has largely escaped notice.
>
> Skepticism of online “news” serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be 
> bypassed, researchers have found — especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected “meme.”
>
> At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, “Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as 
> a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences,” said 
> Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times’s Upshot 
> column).
>
> For starters, said Colleen Seifert, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, “People have a 
> benevolent view of Facebook, for instance, as a curator, but in fact it does have a motive of its own. What it’s 
> actually doing is keeping your eyes on the site. It’s curating news and information that will keep you watching.”
>
> That kind of curating acts as a fertile host for falsehoods by simultaneously engaging two predigital social-science 
> standbys: the urban myth as “meme,” or viral idea; and individual biases, the automatic, subconscious presumptions 
> that color belief.
>
> The first process is largely data-driven, experts said, and built into social media algorithms. The wide circulation 
> of bizarre, easily debunked rumors — so-called Pizzagate, for example, the canard that Hillary Clinton was running a 
> child sex ring from a Washington-area pizza parlor — is not entirely dependent on partisan fever (though that was its 
> origin).
>
> For one, the common wisdom that these rumors gain circulation because most people conduct their digital lives in echo 
> chambers or “information cocoons” is exaggerated, Dr. Nyhan said.
>
> In a forthcoming paper, Dr. Nyhan and colleagues review the relevant research, including analyses of partisan online 
> news sites and Nielsen data, and find the opposite. Most people are more omnivorous than presumed; they are not 
> confined in warm bubbles containing only agreeable outrage.
>
> [snip]
>
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