Twitter grabbed the headlines after they began to annotate some of Donald Trump’s tweets as misleading. It was the most visible attempt by the platform to improve the quality of information shared across the site.
It also marked them out as distinct from Facebook, who were much more reluctant to make any steps of that nature. It’s perhaps no surprise, therefore, that research from CU Boulder finds Facebook a more fertile breeding ground for fake news than Twitter.
The research also found that people who generally have low levels of trust, both in each other, and in conventional media, were far more likely to spread fake news than their peers.
“We found that certain types of people are disproportionally responsible for sharing the false, misleading, and hyper-partisan information on social media,” the researchers say. “If we can identify those types of users, maybe we can get a better grasp of why people do this and design interventions to stem the transfer of this harmful information.”
Spreading misinformation
The researchers highlight previous work that has found that older Republicans are most likely to share misinformation online, and they wanted to take a more nuanced look at the matter.
They recruited several hundred regular users of Facebook and Twitter, and analyzed their content between August 1st 2015 and June 6th 2017, which provided a nice cross section either side of the 2016 election.
Alongside this, each volunteer completed a survey to understand their ideology on the conservative/liberal spectrum, and to identify how much they trust their immediate friends and family, the wider community, and mainstream media. In assessing the content shared on social media, the researchers were particularly looking for content from 106 websites that had been identified as fake news.
“Despite the fact that we tend to call it ‘fake’ news, a lot of this stuff is not completely false,” the researchers explain. “Rather, it is grossly biased, misleading and hyper-partisan, omitting important information.”
Well behaved
The good news is that many of us actually share no content from such disreputable sites, with 71% of Facebook users and 95% of Twitter users falling into this camp. The bad news is that this still meant that 1,152 pieces of fake news were shared on Facebook alone, with a single user responsible for a whopping 171 of these. This number dwarfs the 128 pieces of fake news shared on Twitter.
Of those who shared the fake news on Facebook, the majority came from those who had self-identified as extremely conservative, which was a similar picture on Twitter as well. Indeed, roughly twice as many ‘extreme conservatives’ shared fake news as those who identified as ‘extreme liberals’.
The two groups at either extreme shared around half of all of the fake news between them, despite only making up 20% of the overall users. Those who were both in the ideological middle, and who had high social and media trust, were among the least likely to share fake news.
“People with high levels of social trust are more likely to compile online social networks comprised of diverse individuals, and this can hamper the spread of fake news,” the researchers conclude. “If someone posts something that is incorrect, false or misleading, I don’t think it hurts for individual users to provide a factual rebuttal.”
