HOW MISINFORMATION SPREADS ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND WAYS OF TACKLE IT

 MAJOR CAUSES OF MISINFORMATION AND FAKE NEWS

In ancient times, false rumours or misinformation used to spread across in a limited community gradually. However, with the advent of social media the rate of spreading of misinformation reached dangerously high levels. There are numerous causes of dispersion of false information or fake news, some of which are discussed below.


  1. OVERLOAD OF INFORMATION

We live in an era where we are being overwhelmed by social media news, posts or memes. Every day we scroll through hundreds of different topics related to various fields of life. As much as it has become easier to access information, the reliability and accuracy of the information has degraded to a considerable level. Resultantly, it has become really difficult to differentiate rights from wrongs. The glut of information has also caused the loss of high-quality information. This is because social media algorithm promotes memes based on their popularity rather than reliability. Moreover, social media exploits the cognitive vulnerabilities of its users by presenting such newsfeeds which already aligns with their beliefs.

2. SOCIAL CONFORMITY OVERCOMES INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES

Imagine a person is skeptical about a certain topic which is being discussed on a social site. However, his social circle including his family and friends hold a popularized opinion on that subject. Upon viewing their posts or retweets, the person will be naturally inclined towards the opinion which is held by his social group. The problem is that people tend to confuse popularity with quality and end up copying the behavior they observe on social media without inspecting the truth of the matter. Moreover, it can produce polarization and segregation on the platform as people are divided on the basis of two of the most popular trends. It ultimately creates extremist views and mob mentality takes over. Additionally, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram place trending content at the top of our newsfeed. Few of us realize that these cues do not provide independent assessments of quality.

3. SOCIAL MEDIA AMPLIFIES HOMOPHILY

You might have heard the proverb, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Homopilly is defined in the same manner, which refers to the tendency of individuals to bond with like-minded people. Users have the choice to choose what kind of content they want to consume as well as the option to follow or unfriend someone. All this serves to intensify Homophily through social media, which allows users to alter their social networking structure. Ultimately people become segregated into large, dense and increasingly misinformed communities. Individuals who regularly consume negative content are likely to share negative posts and those who are mostly exposed to positive content are likely to share positive information. Psychologically, negativity tends to spread faster than positivity so it is very easy to manipulate emotions by producing narratives that trigger negative responses such as fear, Cyberbullying and anxiety.

4. ROLE OF BOTS IN SPREADING MISINFORMATION

Since the inception of social sites, Bots have played a very crucial role in spreading disinformation by promoting fake narratives and damaging the quality of information. In this day and age, it has become fairly easy to set up thousands of bots to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. Bots are used to amplify certain trends by retweeting or liking their respective hashtags, which in turn boost up the popularity of the post and impact the audience in the long run. According to research in 2017, It was estimated that up to 15 percent of active Twitter accounts were bots — and that they had played a key role in the spread of misinformation during the 2016 U.S. election period.

5. PROPAGANDA

Social media is frequently being used as a tool for political and economic gains throughout the world. Propaganda includes intentional spread of fake news in mass media to twist the narrative of the masses in favor of a specific political, economic or social group. As with other forms of misinformation, propaganda often plays with emotions of people by using victim cards or using other dishonest tricks to achieve their purpose. Furthermore, use of half truths, distorted quotes or statistics and out of context statements in ads and speeches are also used to win over the sympathies of people. Endorsements from Celebrities and politicians are also relied upon to strengthen the agenda.

SOLUTIONS

In order to stay safe from the surge of negativity and misinformation of social media, we need to better understand our cognitive weaknesses and how social media algorithms and bots work to exploit these loopholes. As far as bots are concerned, we have several softwares or programmatic tools at our disposal which are able to identify and nullify the effects of these artificially implanted machines. However, greater changes at government and institutional level are also required to combat the dispersion of fake news. For instance, Education and awareness campaigns regarding misuse of mass media can help to a great extent. Another way to tackle misleading information is to make it difficult for the users to spread cheap or low quality posts by introducing features which demand payment in order to share a particular piece of information.

Overload of information has caused our attention span to shrink to alarmingly low levels, due to which users keep on sharing popularized content or memes without even giving much thought to the type of material they are sharing. Consciously thinking about the information and taking time to confirm its authenticity can also prove to be a great idea to combat the issue of misinformation. Apart from this, fake news can also be spread through paid advertisement to target a certain community. So, such types of ads need to be overlooked and investigated regularly to minimize potential threat of segregation within a community.

Furthermore, it is our moral and social responsibility to report any piece of content on the internet which we may find suspicious. In order to check its reliability we need to look into the publisher and author of the content. Whether the writer has an established reputation or the sources which are mentioned are accurate or not. In short, if you have identified misinformation, abuse or harmful content on social media, you should report it by following the guidelines given by the respective platform. Finally, don’t forget to re-check the date of publication of the content. A suspicious article may not be fake news, it could be accurate according to the context which was at the time of publication.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Unlocking the Full Potential of Large Language Models

Image
Imagine you’re trying to solve a tricky puzzle. You don’t just blurt out the answer — you think it through, step by step, until you finally reach the solution. This process of breaking down a problem into smaller, manageable chunks is precisely what Chain-of-Thought Prompting does for large language models (LLMs). It’s like giving your AI a roadmap for solving complex tasks, and it’s a game-changer. What is Chain-of-Thought Prompting? Chain-of-Thought Prompting is a technique that helps LLMs, like GPT-4, think through problems in a structured way. Instead of jumping straight to an answer, the model generates a series of intermediate steps or “thoughts.” This chain of thoughts guides the model through the reasoning process, improving its ability to tackle tasks that require multi-step thinking. Think of it as the difference between guessing the answer to a math problem and showing your work. By laying out the steps, the model can better handle complex queries and provide more accurate r...
Read more

Only 2 things Keeping You from Becoming a 6-figure Copywriter

Image
Copywriting is anything you write to sell, promote, or advertise a particular service or product. But do you know it is much more than that? Over the course of my career as a copywriter. I have come across many aspiring copywriters who need help to reach their sales targets. They are constantly failing to express the true utility of the products to their target audience. All successful copywriters have one thing in common that makes them stand apart from the rest. They know how to keep a fine balance between: The utility of the product or service AND… The emotional appeal it carries The Problem It Solves By the utility of the product, I mean what kind of problem your product solves. How does your product have a net positive impact on your daily life and how much time or effort it saves you from? Basically, you need to identify the solutions your product provides to your customers. For instance, If you’re living in Delhi or Lahore (Two cities having a cutthroat competition in having the...
Read more

Learn: Zero-Shot, One-Shot, and Few-Shot Prompting

Image
Imagine asking a friend for a favor, and without giving them any details, they somehow figure out exactly what you want. Now imagine explaining the same task to another friend, but this time with a single example to make it a little clearer. For a third friend, you give a handful of examples to make sure they fully understand. These three ways of guiding someone are actually quite similar to how we guide AI in language tasks! When it comes to working with AI models, we call these approaches  zero-shot ,  one-shot , and  few-shot prompting . Let’s unpack these terms, explore how they work, and dive into some fun examples to see how they bring out the best in AI. What Is Prompting in AI? Before we jump into the three types, let’s clarify what  prompting  means in the context of AI. Prompting is simply giving an AI model a cue or instruction to generate the response we’re looking for. AI models, especially large language models like GPT-4, learn from vast amounts o...
Read more