Widely cited study of fake news retracted by researchers

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

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: January 13, 2019 at 3:36:50 AM GMT+9
> To: Interesting Stuff list <is () iconia com>
> Subject: IS: Widely cited study of fake news retracted by researchers
>
> EXCERPT:
> Last year, a study was published in the Journal of Human Behavior, explaining why fake news goes viral on social 
> media. The study itself went viral, being covered by dozens of news outlets. But now, it turns out there was an error 
> in the researchers’ analysis that invalidates their initial conclusion, and the study has been retracted.
>
> The study sought to determine the role of short attention spans and information overload in the spread of fake news. 
> To do this, researchers compared the empirical data from social networking sites that show that fake news is just as 
> likely to be shared as real news — a fact that Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at 
> Indiana University and a co-author of the study, stresses to Rolling Stone is still definitely true — to a simplified 
> model they created of a social media site where they could control for various factors.
>
> Because of an error in processing their findings, their results showed that the simplified model was able to 
> reproduce the real-life numbers, determining that people spread fake news because of their short attention spans and 
> not necessarily, for example, because of foreign bots promoting particular stories. Last spring, the researchers 
> discovered the error when they tried to reproduce their results and found that while attention span and information 
> overload did impact how fake news spread through their model network, they didn’t impact it quite enough to account 
> for the comparative rates at which real and fake news spread in real life. They alerted the journal right away, and 
> the journal deliberated for almost a year whether to issue a correction or a retraction, before finally deciding on 
> Monday to retract the article.
>
> “For me, it’s very embarrassing, but errors occur and of course when we find them we have to correct them,” Menczer 
> tells Rolling Stone. “The results of our paper show that in fact the low attention span does play a role in the 
> spread of low-quality information, but to say that something plays a role is not the same as saying that it’s enough 
> to fully explain why something happens. It’s one of many factors.”...
>
> [...]
> https://nypost.com/2019/01/11/widely-cited-study-of-fake-news-retracted-by-researchers/
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  



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