Let's Talk About: True and False News

From the Science Magazine website

You see them everywhere, reader.



You know what I’m talking about. Don't deny yourself. It's there and you know it. I'm talking about those arguments that spread around like wildfire which deals with heavily scrutinized issues in today's world. Those juicy headlines that claim something but really don't. The constant discerning of misinformation that you do from websites you've never heard of while roaming on social media.

They all depict false news.

Information deemed as untrue has been on the rise recently in ubiquitous media platforms, thus paving the way for ambiguous news sources to step out into the limelight and garner followers at their will. As such, the publishing of such articles can be regarded as a fertile ground for deep virality, which stands for the potential for any kind of material to spread rapidly in a short amount of time.

I see them all the time as well. Alleged rumors of true important events come out en masse to portray a specific political agenda or conspiracy just for the sake of seeking attention. The sort of tabloid headlines you normally see in gossip magazines is reflected in comparison to standard journalism.

Politics, natural disasters, tragedies, sports, science, business….

Pregnancies, couples forming, announcements of projects, the knowing of famous celebrities’ personal lives….

They're all the same in the sense of providing news and heavy scrutiny.

With such magnitude of attention hovering around the news sources, it should then be no surprise to see groups or individuals in the outer part of the coverage realm provide “ground-breaking” information over their area of expertise.

For every singular thing that is true, there is another that is untrue. It's sort of like good and evil. With that in mind, I thought to myself, "How is it that false news is able to spread so quickly to the point where I can see them every single day?" It was mind-boggling for me to comprehend. Fortunately for me, a technologically-proficient trio of professors thought the same way.

I happened to come across this particular study from the Science Magazine website and--let’s just say it was pretty interesting. It talked about the general spreading of both true and false news in social media, most specifically on Twitter. It was conducted by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, & Sinan Aral to see if there was any difference in how fast and deep true and false news both spread. How did they compare to each other? Were they both the same in essence? If there was a difference, what causes them? Which one spread the quickest? Which one spread to the most people? What they concluded from their research was that "false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information," meaning the former spread more quickly and vastly than the latter.

Huh.

Well fuck my sideburns and call me daddy. Color me shocked. Not really. I kind of expected this to be the case. To understand how this came to be, let me first give the definition of the word "novelty".

novelty

/nävəltē/

noun

Definition: the quality of being new, original, or unusual.

The key word to look out for here is "unusual". For something to be called a novelty, it has to be one that is not normal. It has to be brand new, unfamiliar, strange, and unusual. Think of it like this, reader. When you see something strange in public, you can't help but lock your eyes on it. It's like when you're walking down the sidewalk and you suddenly see a turtle riding a unicycle with one leg on the street. It's absurd, but you can't help but glare at it. It's a spectacle. It has swallowed your attention, regardless of whether it is rational or not. Performances can gravitate a plentiful amount of people towards them at one time. The same can be said about the news. What we do as the observing audience in response to the things we see or read is up to our own discretion, but there's no denying that we won't sit down and keep everything to ourselves. Pent-up emotions as a result of reading such news can come out through our expression of opinions in replies on the matter. 

It is because of this dynamic that the researchers took it into account for their study. According to their paper, feelings of fear, disgust, and surprise were mostly shown in replies of people who responded to novel false news. Conversely, in true news, feelings of sadness, anticipation, and trust were expressed in the replies of people who read them.

Those assessed feelings in response to both true and false news are those that I resonate with wholeheartedly. I say this because I've experienced them firsthand. On one side, reading about true events such as school shootings, natural disasters, political events (elections, bill passings, and so on) and the like are all things that made me feel melancholic of the world around me. It reminds me of the troubles we deal with every day as a society. On the other side, I expressed a few instances of fear, disgust, and surprise throughout my life after reading somewhat false events/claims. For example, when I was younger, I heard murmurs of the world ending thanks to the supposed December 21, 2012 doomsday phenomena and I was scared because of it. It got me so paranoid at one point that in times where I slept I couldn’t do so because I was thinking of the destruction that may or may not happen in the future. Other times, when I surfed Facebook in my timeline, I felt shocked and disgusted after seeing the ludicrous attempts of disingenuous scammers whose tricks would persuade users into believing their baseless conspiracies.

"You will not believe what happened in 2001 after Obama worked with the Al'Qaeda to bring down the World Trade Center!!!!!"

Sure. Ok. Yeah right.

While I’m on the subject, let me just say to those people that you’re not “woke”. You’re stupid, and you should feel bad for being so stupid.

I'm positive I'm not the only one who has thought this way. I'm glad that I'm able to recognize which article is true and which is not. You probably have this capability as well, reader.

However, not everyone is going to react the same way as you did to false news. Even though you know that what you're reading or seeing is indisputably incorrect, others will joyously embrace it and label it as fact. Additionally, those people will call true news "fake news" since it may not be up to par in their narrative, whatever that may be.  Such shouting from them can only call for trouble, as the political climate in our country today has sadly turned into a highly-volatile boxing ring that serves as the centerpiece for verbal slugfests. If you haven't seen scenes like this before, allow me to direct you to the Twitter of United States President Donald Trump. Click on any of his tweets, and you will see nothing but fighting by scores of people with conflicting views of the man who wrote them. Although communicating with this group of people may probably be toxic, there's absolutely no reason for everyone else to completely ignore them. They're the reason why false news has been spreading more quickly and vastly than true news by a fair margin.

Now you would think that the reason why this is happening is due to the number of followers the users who post them have and how often they engage with their social media audience. More followers equal more exposure; more exposure equals more likes & retweets; more likes & retweets equals rapid virality. That's normally how it's supposed to be, right?

Actually, no.

Instead of naming the users who have more followers and post novel false news often for their crowd to see as the consensus for its proliferation, the actual reason for the rise of such news is, according to the paper, the exact opposite. "Users who spread false news had significantly fewer followers, followed significantly fewer people, were significantly less active on Twitter, were verified significantly less often, and had been on Twitter for significantly less time." It was unbelievable when I read that part. “No way will I ever accept this!” is what I thought; but alas, I had to. Despite these unexpected circumstances, "falsehood diffused farther and faster than the truth despite these differences, not because of them."

One would never think that such people with scarce usage and a speck number of followers exist. They might be bots disguising themselves as people! Furthermore, they were likely created by foreign intelligence agencies with the aim to destabilize the trust the citizens have for their government! How evil of them! The researchers understood this possibility as well, so they implemented a supposed "bot-detection algorithm" to identify and remove all the bots that may interfere with the study. After all was said and done in the original iteration of the study, they then put the discovered bots back where they were to see if any change of their main conclusions occurred. In the end, it all stayed the same. This confirms, according to the professors, that it isn't bots who are responsible for the spreading of misinformation—it’s us humans.

People come out in droves left and right to send messages that fit within their ideologies. They may tell you that their side is just, correct, & viable and their opponents are absolute vile specimen who are friends of Satan. There's no avoiding it. On top of that, they send you untruthful, unrecognized publications with the mindset that you will undoubtedly sway over to their side, thus increasing their strength. It concerns me that people from whatever age will be persuaded to distrustful sources of false news.

What I ask of you, the reader, to do when you come across things like this is to not blindly accept anything you see at first glance. Don't trust your gut and instead search for proof to see if the person making those rumors is really just rambling hokum. This is for the sake of your own self-awareness towards current events. Don't blindly accept anything you come across on the computer/phone screen. By doing this, you can stop the spreading of false news. Your contribution may be minimal in scale, but it's what you do right then and there that serves as the foundation of preserving the credibility of true news that is expansive, fruitful, and obstinate.

The need for true news to spread extensively is evident now more than ever before. Journalists and their integrity have been put under fire by amoral proponents who abash their findings just to protect their own skin and personal benefits. They throw out phrases such as "cuck", “deplorable” and "fake news" towards their counterparts in a faint attempt to stigmatize the truth. They can do this at their behest, but it won't change what is correct. To lie is to run away from the truth. The truth should not be ignored in the slightest and it shouldn't be manipulated also. It is up to us to ensure that the spreading of false news is halted profusely. Anything else can mean the putrefying of respected journalism. Search for what is correct and don't believe in anything that is aloof and incorrect. Keep this study in mind when you go about your daily life and look through your phone. Chances are you'll eventually encounter what I just talked about in spades on this entry.

They are everywhere after all.

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Source used in this entry: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

Please give it a read if you can.