Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences,
The psychology behind social media platforms -- the dynamics that make them such powerful vectors of misinformation in the first place -- is at least as important, experts say, especially for those who think they're immune to being duped. For all the suspicions about social media companies' motives and ethics, it is the interaction of the technology with our common, often subconscious psychological biases that makes so many of us vulnerable to misinformation, and this has largely escaped notice.
Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found -- especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme."
At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column).
Authors Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, Lada A. Adamic (Exposure to ideologically diverse
news and opinion on Facebook)
analyzed the news feeds of some 10 million users in the United States who posted their political views, and concluded that "individuals' choices played a stronger role in limiting exposure" to contrary news and commentary than Facebook's own algorithmic ranking -- which gauges how interesting stories are likely to be to individual users, based on data they have provided.
Colleen Seifert, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, "People have a benevolent view of Facebook, for instance, as a curator, but in fact it does have a motive of its own. What it's actually doing is keeping your eyes on the site. It's curating news and information that will keep you watching."
That kind of curating acts as a fertile host for falsehoods by simultaneously engaging two predigital social-science standbys: the urban myth as "meme," or viral idea; and individual biases, the automatic, subconscious presumptions that color belief.
The first process is largely data-driven, experts said, and built into social media algorithms. The wide circulation of bizarre, easily debunked rumors -- so-called Pizzagate, for example, the canard that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from a Washington-area pizza parlor -- is not entirely dependent on partisan fever (though that was its origin).
For one, the common wisdom that these rumors gain circulation because most people conduct their digital lives in echo chambers or "information cocoons" is exaggerated, Dr. Nyhan said.
In a forthcoming paper, Dr. Nyhan and colleagues review the relevant research, including analyses of partisan online news sites and Nielsen data, and find the opposite. Most people are more omnivorous than presumed; they are not confined in warm bubbles containing only agreeable outrage.
But they don't have to be for fake news to spread fast, research also suggests. Social media algorithms function at one level like evolutionary selection: Most lies and false rumors go nowhere, but the rare ones with appealing urban-myth "mutations" find psychological traction, then go viral.