How to get 10,000 retweets on Twitter.
Chickens migrate to Mars amidst fear of corn reprisals. Teeth clean your toothpastes. Spiders have seven legs and one arm. The earth is a globe. Fake news. It’s everywhere nowadays. It’s modern, it’s popular, and it’s a problem. And like all problems, our best chance of solving it is working out what’s causing it.
“The spread of true and false news online”, was published this week in a journal called Science. Its MIT authors analysed over 3 million tweets made between 2006–2017 coming to a pretty worrying conclusion:
“Falsehoods diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information”.
Surely this can’t be true Evan? Tell me for the sake of my future robotic grandchildren that this isn’t so.
Well I’m sorry, the study is a good one, its processes thorough and scientific. The researchers used 6 top fact checking websites to identify every major contested news story that has come up over Twitter’s history. They then used privileged access to search through all of the tweets relating to these news stories. Truthful news simply can’t compete with its false counterpart. Fake news was circa 70% more likely to be retweeted than real news, spread to 1500 people 6 times faster, and had a profounder reach. What do I mean by that last bit?
There are two ways to get to 10,000 retweets. A maximus biggus person, with a lot of followers, posts a tweet, let’s call it Tweet A. Their followers see it and retweet it. Tweet A was broadcast to a large initial audience, and whilst successful, was successful in a shallow way.
Tweet B on the other hand originates from a smallus unpopularus person, without many followers, but one of their followers retweets it, and one of their followers retweets it, and so on, until it also gets to 10,000 retweets.
Here’s the important bit. Tweet B was ostensibly broader in its reach than Tweet A, appearing in the feeds of people with a greater degree of separation from the original tweeter.
Interestingly, Tweet A’s route to success is typical of true news and Tweet B’s typical of fake news. So that’s what I mean when I say Fake news has a profounder reach. It goes deeper and spreads farther. Tweet B went viral in a way that Tweet A never did.
In August 2015, a rumour popped up on social media that Donald Trump had allowed a sick child to use his plane to get urgent medical care. A rumour that was true, but one that was only shared or retweeted by around 1300 people.
In February 2016, a rumour surfaced that Trump’s cousin had passed away, leaving a plea to the American people in his obituary. “As a proud bearer of the Trump name, I implore you all, please don’t let that walking mucus bag become president”. A rumour that was false, but this time feverishly spread by the Twitter-sphere. The story was shared 38,000 times and grew a retweet chain 3 times longer than the sick-child-plane real story.
So why is fake news eminently more shareable?
The MIT researchers settled on two hypotheses to explain the success of fake news.
Firstly, it’s more novel and humans are attracted to novelty. Real news is all over the place and we’re likely to have seen or heard it before. We already know that Petits Filous makes our bones grow strongererer. Boooriingg. Falsehoods, conversely, tend to be significantly different from what we’ve recently had floating around our newsbubbles. So we think wow. That is novel. Me clicky retweet.
Secondly, fake news generally makes use of more emotive language. It arouses stronger emotions and thus is likely to have a higher level of engagement. The researchers used a top tier sentiment-analysis tool to find this out. Tweets professing falsehoods; they tended to use language associated with surprise and disgust. Tweets professing fact; they tended to use language associated with sadness and trust.
But “Evan”, you say as you crack a wry smile, “bots mate”. “It’s been all over the news — bots stoking the spread of misinformation on social media”. “Surely they are the main reason that fake news spreads faster?!”
Well, not according to our esteemed MIT scientist friends who found that over the tweet dataset bots promoted both true and false news in equal measure. We cannot blindly blame bots. We humans are the ones who most dramatically promote fake news, wittingly or not. We like shiny novel stories and we most like the shiny novel stories that shock and move us. Our psychology demands that we find fake news retweet-worthy.
And once the fake news has been birthed — well, like anything that’s been birthed, it’s pretty hard to take back. There’s little evidence that people truly reconsider their opinions once news is called out as false. Somewhere in our minds, consciously or subconsciously, we hold onto the falsehood; It contributes to our world view. It’s done its damage.
The battle to cut fake news from our collective diet is just beginning. Now we know that our human brains are greatly to blame, the fight has become more complex. Short of lobotomy, the prevalence of fake news is going to be hard to deter. Any platform that democratizes content production and then promotes that which is most engaging, is at risk of stoking the flames of falsehood. No one really knows how to solve this problem. If you know, send help. In the meantime, lie low, grease your ears, and get your news from a reputable supplier.
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