Fake News Travels Fast

It Really Works

Fake News (false news) moves faster and deeper than the real stuff. The reason is economic. According to a study done last spring, social media rewards views. More eyeballs see the false stuff. The motivation is profit. The effect can be devastating.

Marketplace reporter Molly Wood interviews Sinan Aral of the Harvard Business Review. 

Sinan Aral: There's a story from Barack Obama's presidency where a false tweet that indicated that he was injured in an explosion wiped out a $130 billion of equity value in a single day. These types of stories can have consequential impacts on our democracy, on businesses, on our national security. And so it's a problem we really need to concentrate on.

According to the study that came out of MIT, Twitter leads among all platforms for spreading false news. Is it a coincidence that the president prefers that platform above all others?

Even more disturbing, "A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find, "A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best."

Journalists, people who check sources, must be free to counter the tsunami of misinformation posing as news in our news feeds. They cannot face it alone. We need to be more informed as consumers about false narratives. Those narratives need to called out.  Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google will need to do more to stem the tide of misinformation. If they are unwilling to do that, consumers can boycott and regulators must regulate.