It’s perhaps fair to say that awareness of fake news has seldom been higher, but do we do enough to reject it, or even find out whether news is reliable or not?  New research from the University of Washington suggests not.

The researchers monitored a group of volunteers as they used Facebook and Twitter.  Unbeknownst to the volunteers, a Google Chrome extension was randomly inserting debunked content into their news feeds to see how they would react to the content.

“We wanted to understand what people do when they encounter fake news or misinformation in their feeds. Do they notice it? What do they do about it?” the researchers explain. “There are a lot of people who are trying to be good consumers of information and they’re struggling. If we can understand what these people are doing, we might be able to design tools that can help them.”

Browsing behavior

The researchers wanted to use the Chrome extension to allow people to use their own social media accounts, and therefore make the experience as lifelike as possible.  This allowed the fake content to appear to come from people the volunteers would ordinarily follow.

All of the fake news stories had been debunked by the Snopes.com website, with each story inserted such that it appeared to come from a friend, a family member, or other people each volunteer normally follow.

“We’d have them scroll through their feeds with the extension active,” the researcher explains. “I told them to think aloud about what they were doing or what they would do if they were in a situation without me in the room. So then people would talk about ‘Oh yeah, I would read this article,’ or ‘I would skip this.’ Sometimes I would ask questions like, ‘Why are you skipping this? Why would you like that?'”

In total, nine fake stories were introduced into the Facebook feeds of volunteers, and seven on Twitter, with the sharing and liking features disabled on each story.

Detection strategies

The researchers attempted to understand some of the strategies people were deploying to spot fake news.  Perhaps the most common was simply ignoring the vast majority of content online, with posts that were either too long or too political commonly avoided.

There were some types of content that triggered alarm bells however, such as when it jarred with the usual content expected from an individual.   While these were sometimes investigated, however, mostly they were simply ignored.

“I am interested in the times that people are skeptical but then choose not to investigate. Do they still incorporate it into their worldviews somehow?” the researcher explains. “At the time someone might say, ‘That’s an ad. I’m going to ignore it.’ But then later do they remember something about the content, and forget that it was from an ad they skipped? That’s something we’re trying to study more now.”

While the researchers accept that their study had a small pool of volunteers, they believe it provides a valuable start point for further exploration of just how people may respond to misinformation that does appear in their newsfeed.  What is perhaps most telling however, is that the fake news introduced was incongruent with the normal content shared by those people, whereas you do wonder if most fake news is content that people actively sign up to receive, so it’s not unusual at all.  In such scenarios, it’s undoubtedly harder to weed out because it runs up against confirmation biases.