How Fake News Goes Viral

[tadaaa]

There appears to be a conspiracy to spread false conspiracy theories.

that's what they want you to think!!

 

[Rory]

Article on the BBC today suggesting an alternate cause for fake news: "misaligned social information interpretation":

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190905-how-our-brains-get-overloaded-by-the-21st-century

As Hendricks and Hansen put it, “when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof”. When we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.

Content from external source

To summarise: when people need to react to something other people are doing - such as when a crowd is caught in a stampede - we can either take the time to research exactly what's going on, or we can make a snap judgment based on what we see in others' actions. Part of why people believe fake news and don't fully research the stories, some researchers proposed, could therefore be a hard-wired, time saving, and generally useful shortcut to getting information based on what the crowd is doing.