Social media is a common start point when it comes to accessing the latest news, but new research from Ohio State University highlights just how problematic that is.  This is largely because the platform encourages people to mix serious news with more entertaining content, which causes people to pay less attention to the source of the news content, which can encourage them to let fake news pass off as reality.

Such blurring of the lines didn’t occur when news was clearly divided into its own category.  The researchers believe their findings highlight the risks associated with getting news from sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

“We are drawn to these social media sites because they are one-stop shops for media content, updates from friends and family, and memes or cat pictures,” the researchers say.  “But that jumbling of content makes everything seem the same to us. It makes it harder for us to distinguish what we need to take seriously from that which is only entertainment.”

Link me

The researchers developed a fake social media site, which they called Link Me.  Several hundred volunteers were then shown several pages on the website, each with a few posts on them.  Each post consisted of a headline, a short paragraph that summarized the story, and the source of the post.  Each of the sources was designed to be either highly credible or not, with the name and description of each source easily revealing which camp they fell into.

After they’d viewed the site, each volunteer was asked a number of questions, with the authors especially keen to understand how much attention the volunteers had paid to the current affairs topics that had been mixed in with other categories of content.

“That would suggest that they were paying attention to the sources of the posts and understanding what was news and what was not,” the researchers explain.

This is precisely what appeared to happen, with the volunteers less able to pay attention when news content was mixed with other topics.  This meant they were less able to verify the reliability of the content.

Fake news

The researchers suggest this might be one reason why fake news manages to gain such traction when it appears on social media.  They cite the example of a story from the React365 website, which claimed a cruise ship had crashed, killing 32 people.  The story was shared around 350,000 times on Facebook, despite being completely made up.

The researchers believe a central part of the problem is the way in which most social media sites display content in exactly the same way, regardless of the source.

“There is no visual distinction on Facebook between something from the New York Times and something from a random blog. They all have the same color scheme, same font,” they explain.

Until such distinctions are made, the responsibility rests upon users to pay more attention to precisely where their news is coming from.

“Right now, the structure of information platforms – especially social media – may be reducing positive media literacy behaviors,” the researchers conclude.