Why Social Media Became the Perfect Incubator for Hoaxes and Misinformation

Scientific American
In the summer of 2015 Governor Greg Abbott gave the Texas State Guard an unusual order: keep an eye on the Jade Helm 15 exercise, just in case the online rumors are true. In reality, Jade Helm 15 was a routine eight-week military exercise conducted in Texas and six other states. In the online echo chamber, however, it was something more sinister: the beginning of a coup ordered by President Barack Obama.

One great promise of the creation of the World Wide Web was that users might be exposed to diversified points of view. The human attention span, however, remains limited, and news feed algorithms may favor selective exposure. Users show the tendency to select information that adheres to their beliefs and join polarized groups formed around a shared narrative, called echo chambers. In these closed communities, polarization is dominant. In this environment, unreliable rumors and conspiracy theories spread widely. Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but in an age of rampant populism and digital activism, they have acquired new power to influence real-world events—usually for the worse. In a 2017 report on global risks, the World Economic Forum named the polarization and the viral spread of biased information as one of the most dangerous social trends of the age.With antidemocratic politicians on the rise throughout the West, we are now seeing the danger of viral misinformation become manifest. Our biases make it difficult to discern reliable information when polarization is dominant.And social media platforms have made it easy for ideas—even false ones—to spread around the globe almost instantaneously.

Data scientists have recently made significant progress in understanding the spread and consumption of information, its effect on opinion formation, and the ways people influence one another. Advances in technology have made it possible to exploit the deluge of data from social media—the traces that people use as they choose, share and comment online—to study social dynamics at a high level of resolution.
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Plus, READ THE FULL REPORT “Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation,” published in PLOS ONE.