Two studies published Thursday in the journal Science prove not only that misinformation on social media changes minds, but that a small group of committed “supersharers,” mostly older Republican women, were responsible for the vast majority of “false news “. in the period considered.
The studies, led by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were conducted independently but complement each other well.
In the MIT study led by Jennifer Allen, researchers point out that misinformation has often been blamed for vaccine hesitancy in 2020 and beyond, but that the phenomenon remains poorly documented. And it’s understandable: not only is the data coming from the world of social media immense and complex, but the companies involved are reluctant to participate in studies that could present them as the main vector of disinformation and other data wars. Few doubt it, but it is not the same thing as scientific verification.
The study first shows that exposure to misinformation about vaccines (in 2021 and 2022, when the researchers collected their data), particularly anything claiming to have a negative effect on health, actually reduces the people’s intention to be vaccinated. (And intention, as previous studies show, correlates with actual vaccination.)
Second, the study showed that articles flagged by moderators at the time as misinformation had a greater effect on vaccine hesitancy than content that was not flagged – so, cheers for flagging. Except that the volume of unreported misinformation was much greater than that reported. So even though the individual effect was smaller, its overall influence was likely much greater overall.
This type of misinformation, they said, was more akin to major media outlets publishing misleading information that incorrectly characterized risks or studies. For example, who remembers the headline “Healthy Doctor Dies Two Weeks After Receiving COVID Vaccine; CDC Investigates Chicago Tribune’s Why? As the newspaper’s commentators point out, there is no evidence that the vaccine had anything to do with his death. Yet despite being seriously misleading, it was not flagged as misinformation and subsequently the headline was viewed some 55 million times, or six times as many people as the total number of people who have seen all the documents reported.
“This conflicts with the conventional wisdom that fake news on Facebook was responsible for low vaccinations in the United States,” Allen told TechCrunch. “It could be that Facebook use is correlated with less vaccination (as other research has found), but it could be that it’s the ‘gray area’ content that’s causing the the effect, not the strangely wrong elements.”
The bottom line, then, is that while suppressing blatantly false information is useful and justified, it is ultimately just a tiny drop in the bucket of toxic farrago that social media users were then swimming in.
And who were the swimmers spreading this misinformation the most? This is a natural question, but beyond the scope of Allen’s study.
In the second study released Thursday, a multi-academic group came to the rather shocking conclusion that 2,107 registered American voters were responsible for spreading 80% of “fake news” (which term they adopt) during the 2020 election.
That’s a big claim, but the study reduced the data quite convincingly. The researchers examined the activity of 664,391 voters corresponding to active users of misleading.
These 2,107 users exerted (with the help of algorithms) an extremely disproportionate network effect by promoting and sharing links to fake news with political connotations. Data shows that one in 20 American voters have followed one of these supersharers, putting them massively ahead of average accessible users. On any given day, about 7% of all political news linked to specious news sites, but 80% of those links came from these few individuals. People were also much more likely to interact with their posts.
Yet these were not state-funded robot factories or farms. “The massive volume from supersharers did not appear automated but was instead generated by manual, persistent retweeting,” the researchers wrote. (Co-author Nir Grinberg clarified to me that “we can’t be 100% sure that supersharers aren’t sock puppets, but by using state-of-the-art bot detection tools, analyzing temporal patterns and using the apps, they don’t seem automated”).
They compared supersharers to two other groups of users: a random sample and the biggest sharers of non-fake political information. They found that these fake journalists tend to cater to a particular demographic: older people, women, whites, and overwhelmingly Republicans.
Supersharers were only 60% female compared to the panel’s even split, and significantly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to be white compared to the already largely white group as a whole. But they were much older (58 on average versus 41 all-in) and about 65% Republican, compared to about 28% of Twitter’s population at the time.
The demographics are certainly telling, but keep in mind that even a large and very significant majority isn’t the whole story. Millions of people, not 2,107, retweeted this Chicago Tribune article. And even the super-sharers, the Science commentary article points out, “are diverse, including political pundits, media figures, anti-vaxxers with personal, financial, and political motivations for spreading unreliable content.” It’s not just older ladies in red states, even though they feature prominently. Very prominently.
As Baribi-Bartov et al. concludes darkly: “These findings highlight the vulnerability of social media for democracy, where a small group of people distorts political reality for many. »
It reminds us of Margaret Mead’s famous saying: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” In fact, it’s the only thing that ever existed. Somehow I doubt that’s what she had in mind.
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