Editor's note: This article is from the WeChat public account " Tengyun " (ID: tenyun700), author Fang Kecheng.
Although there is still no exact definition of fake news in the academic world, everyone has a general perception that fake news is increasing. Moreover, in the current field of news communication, especially in social media, a fake news spreads far faster, wider and deeper than a real news. Why does fake news run faster than real news? In this issue of Tengyun Reading Club, Fang Kecheng, a doctoral candidate at the School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and former Southern Weekend reporter, will tell you the answer.
This article was edited and published by Tengyun and Muguo Bookshelf.
Fang Kecheng, Ph.D. candidate at the School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, former Southern Weekly reporter.
I don’t know if everyone feels that in the past April Fool’s Day, it seems that there are not so many people around who are willing to “play”? On the eve of April Fool's Day, the American news industry website Poynter published an article with the title: In this age of fake news, what else is there to do on April Fool's Day?
Since about last year, the concept of "fake news" has become a hot spot of global attention, and it is the hottest topic in the media and journalism circles. But what exactly does "fake news" mean? Why can it have a faster spread and wider influence than real news? We need to see the details of this issue clearly.
1. “Fake news” is an imprecise concept
Someone once asked me, does the academic community have a precise definition of "fake news"? The answer is no. This word is often used together with misinformation, but there are different opinions about what it means.
In the context of Europe and the United States, the word "fake news" has actually been weaponized, and politicians often use "fake news" to bombard their opponents with different political views.
In China, the "fake news" that we paid attention to in the early days may refer more to factual errors in news reports by mainstream media. But in today's Internet environment, people don't care too much about the news that these institutions and media have posted errors, because most of the fake news on social media is created by social media accounts, not from traditional media.
In the recent review article "The Science of Fake News" published in "Science" magazine, "fake news" is defined as follows:
We define “fake news” to be fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent. Fake news outlets, in turn, lack the news media’s editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information. Fake news overlaps with other information disorders, such as misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (false information that is purposely spread to deceive people).
According to this policy article, the main way to tell whether news is true or false is to look at who published the information— if it was published by formal institutional media, it is generally considered credible; if not, there is a question mark. This judgment method is much more efficient and accurate than analyzing the content of each article in detail.
The main basis for distinguishing formal institutional media from fake news producers is that the former has organized procedures and editorial codes to ensure the accuracy and credibility of content; the latter does not have such codes and is unwilling to be subject to such norms constraints.
This kind of process and code has been gradually formed over the past few decades and hundreds of years, and includes a large number of operational principles. For example, important information must be "cross-validated" by two or more independent sources. It is these norms and principles that are often referred to in the media as "journalism professionalism".
2. Fake news runs faster than real news
In the era of social media, since both true news producers and fake news producers are constantly producing content, who will ultimately win when these content compete on the same platform?
The study, "The Spread of True and False News Online," published in the journal Science in March, answered that question.
Based on data provided by six fact-checking websites (websites that specialize in verifying the authenticity of news), the researchers selected about 126,000 news from Twitter data between 2006 and 2017, which were true and false. A total of 3 million people participated in the dissemination, and the number of dissemination reached 4.5 million, so it is possible to compare the dissemination power of true news and fake news.
This is one of the main charts in the text.
Briefly, they compared on four dimensions:
The first is depth, the "level" of being forwarded. For example, B forwards A, and C forwards B, then the depth is 3. The study found that the spread of fake news is deeper than real news, the deepest can exceed 19 layers, while the spread of real news basically does not exceed 10 layers.
The second is the number of people, that is, the number of accounts participating in the forwarding. True news is rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1% of fake news can reach 10,000 to 100,000 people. In terms of time, to reach 1,500 people, real news takes six times as long as fake news.
The third is width, that is, the maximum number of people participating in forwarding at any one level. Similarly, the most powerful real news can spread to just over 1,000 people, while fake news can reach tens of thousands of people.
The fourth is structural virality, a value calculated by the researchers, which is also stronger for fake news.
And if fake news was classified, the researchers found that the fastest-spreading categories included politics, urban legends and science. Among them, political fake news is the king of dissemination, and it spreads faster and more widely than other types of fake news.
Of course, it must be pointed out here that these studies are based on Twitter data and may vary in different contexts.
3. Why does fake news run so fast?
In addition to revealing the fact that "fake news is highly disseminated", researchers also try to analyze the reasons behind it.
Could it be because Twitter accounts spreading fake news have more followers and more influence? Their analysis found that, on the contrary, accounts that spread fake news had fewer followers, were less active, and were less authenticated. That is to say, although these accounts themselves are not very influential, fake news can gain great dissemination power through them.
Could it be because bots help spread fake news? Indeed, there are many bot accounts on Twitter that automatically retweet fake news content. However, when the researchers re-analyzed the bot accounts through algorithm identification, the results remained the same. That said, fake news runs faster with or without bots.
Since we can't find the reason from the accounts that spread fake news and the network structure of the spread, we should analyze the fake news itself. The researchers found that fake news retweeted by people has one distinct quality: freshness.
Using natural language processing, they measured the "information distance" between a Twitter account's tweets and fake news 60 days before it was published. To explain the information distance in layman’s terms, it means that the more “incompatible” between these tweets, the greater the information distance. The data shows: Compared with real news, fake news is indeed farther from the information that the forwarder has read before, that is, it is fresher.
In addition to this, they also looked at the emotional responses elicited by fake news and real news. It was found that common emotional responses to fake news were: surprise, disgust, fear, while common responses to real news were: anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust.
In addition to this article in Science magazine, I have also made a few analyses of the reasons for the proliferation of fake news.
The most fundamental reason for the proliferation of fake news: people's hearts
I believe that many people are reluctant to admit the fact that we like to watch fake news or some fake news, we also like to watch some headline parties and some spam information. So, they're there basically because we like to watch them.
This psychological cause can be explained from some evolutionary theories-the reason why our species "Homo sapiens" survived in ancient times was largely because our brains had some inclinations and prejudices For example, we are very sensitive to the turbulent and small threats around us, because then we need to avoid the dangers of nature at any time. Our brain's ability to process information is limited, so we need to select the information that is beneficial to us most effectively and quickly.
Although our era is evolving very fast, our brains are evolving very slowly, so we still use the prejudiced brains of ancient times to deal with current problems. At this time, there may be some decoupling. condition.
Here's a graph that summarizes human "cognitive biases":
▲Image source: https://medium.com/thinking-is-hard/4-conundrums-of-intelligence-2ab78d90740f
How did these prejudices come about? There are 4 major reasons, one of which is said in the upper right corner: there is too much information around us, so we have to choose.
For example, if there is some information that we already know or have an impression of, then we can select this information first.
What kind of situation does this lead to? It is to selectively accept information, and then use this information to deepen a prejudice inherent in oneself, which may have negative consequences.
For another example, because humans are particularly sensitive to changing things, some conspiracy theories or headline parties can use this trait of humans to distort and manipulate information.
We are in an era of information explosion. Before, everyone may still have a very optimistic attitude, thinking that in the information society, human beings can thrive in the information ocean. But then I found out that we are not fish, we can swim without them, dive without them, and the ocean of information is about to drown us.
Therefore, the explosion of information often means the explosion of garbage. When a large amount of information comes in, our brains don’t actually have a good mechanism to filter out useful information. We can only filter by prejudice from ancient times, which will cause you to be easily rubbish. Information is flooded.
In order to keep yourself from being overwhelmed by this spam, you need to proactively combat these preexisting prejudices. In order to combat this tendency in your brain, you need to make constant efforts, and you may be consuming a lot of some kind of sugar in your brain, which is a particularly tiring thing.
But man is a very lazy animal and is afraid of being tired. Therefore, the inherent biases in the human brain combined with the new information environment can easily lead to bad consequences.
A big push for fake news: the rapid development of technology
As I said just now, the evolution of the human brain has always been slow, so why did we not talk much about fake news, spam, and information smog before, but only recently started to talk about it frequently? This is obviously closely related to the development of information technology. Today's developed social media technology has become an important driving force behind the proliferation of fake news.
There was a very popular term before, called empowerment. Many scholars have observed that new digital technologies can make people more powerful. But while technology empowers you to do positive things, it also empowers you to do negative things.
For example, under the empowerment of technology, on social media, each of us can have a voice, and everyone has their own microphone, but your voice can be a good voice, which can bring public discussion and democratic values. The voices who come to contribute can also be bad voices, the voices of trolls, harassment, and bullying, and they produce garbage, misleading, and offensive information.
When it comes to technology, it is natural to talk about algorithms. Many people criticize the algorithm for making the information environment single and planned. We talk about a lot of "information cocoon rooms", polarization of opinions and other issues, which are indeed closely related to algorithms.
However, it cannot be said that the algorithm is a very bad thing, because how to write the algorithm depends entirely on the thinking of people.
For example, if you are liberal, my algorithm can push you liberal things, but you can also write another algorithm that becomes: I find out that you are liberal, then I will deliberately push you conservative things , so that you are exposed to more diverse viewpoints. So how the algorithm performs depends entirely on what you want to achieve with it.
Important context for the proliferation of fake news: a global crisis in journalism
Simply put, the less real news, the greater the proportion of fake news.
You can clearly feel that there has been a lot less excellent investigative reporting in China in recent years. This has a lot to do with the economic decline of the traditionally strong investigative media—for example, Southern Weekly, which I once served.
Because the news industry is in crisis, the supply of high-quality content has also decreased, and the relative proportion has naturally decreased. So, if we want to improve the information environment, we may need to think about how to support these people who produce quality content and produce fresh spiritual food.
The cause of the crisis in journalism is fundamentally the collapse of established business models. It turns out that the business model in the media is secondary sales and bundled sales.
The second sale means that the content is first sold to readers, and then the readers are sold to advertisers. But such an advertising model has collapsed in the Internet age.
You may think that if the content of newspapers can be moved to the Internet, so can advertisements. But in fact, a cruel fact is that the vast majority of online advertising has been taken away by Internet giants, and only a fraction of it has gone to traditional media.
In the United States, the giants are Google and Facebook; in China, it is Tencent, Baidu, Toutiao and other big platforms. Therefore, it is impossible for the media to copy the original secondary sales model in the Internet environment.
What does bundling mean? For example, there are many pages in a newspaper, politics, economy, culture, sports... We may buy a newspaper for very different needs. Some people want to see the situation of sports events, some people of people want to read news about a star, but they all have to buy the entire newspaper. In such a case, those who pay less attention, such as serious and ideological content, are also bundled and sold.
At this time, in the same newspaper, there is a situation that can be called "subsidy", subsidizing the less popular but very important content with those entertaining and more eye-catching content socially meaningful content.
But the Internet age broke that. The characteristics of the Internet era are vertical markets and segmented fields. If I want to know what news, it is enough to pay attention to the public account of this field alone, without paying for other content. In such a case, the serious content is not subsidized.
People all over the world are wondering how to save the situation. Everyone thought of a lot of ways. For example, some people felt that they might need to be supported by local tyrants. Like Bezos, the boss of Amazon, who bought The Washington Post but never interfered with content operations, this may also be a pattern. But the situation is controversial in the United States itself, and perhaps even more so in China, such as the suspicions that arose after Jack Ma bought the South China Morning Post.
It has also been advocated that the foundation should support the construction of non-profit media, which are not for-profit companies and do not need to work hard to make money, in which case it can guarantee the production of high-quality content.
There are very successful examples of non-profit media, such as a site I often mention called ProPublica. ProPublica is a very important non-profit investigative journalism and data journalism website in the United States. It has done a lot of important reports related to public interests and won the Pulitzer Prize for many times.
Some of these blockbuster reports may require a team of journalists to invest half a year. This kind of investment rarely exists in profitable media because the cost is too high.
Running a media under business logic must first consider the issues of cost and revenue, and find ways to reduce costs and increase revenue. Among the non-profit media, they pay more attention to social benefits and do not pursue monetary returns.
However, many people pointed out that this model cannot be promoted on a large scale. It may only support one media, but it cannot support 10, 100, or 1,000 media.
So there must be other methods, such as crowdfunding news.
In China, individual journalists once went to crowdfunding for their own investigative journalism projects, hoping to get everyone's support. The founders of Wikipedia also launched a crowdfunding-backed project last year called Wikitribute. He wants to use Wikipedia's models to make news. Users can make comments and make changes to the news. At the same time, there will be about 10 professional editors and reporters to check the content.
4. What can we do to curb fake news?
Fundamentally, the proliferation of fake news and the poor information environment is the result of the combined effect of all. Because of this, there is something everyone can do if we are disappointed with the current information environment and hope for a change.
If you're a journalist, you should work harder to produce better reporting, and be more conscious of stepping outside the confines of your vision, listening to forgotten voices, and telling neglected stories.
If you are an engineer in a new media company, you should realize that there is never an absolutely objective and neutral algorithm, and there are subjective judgments and choices in all algorithms. Today, when the power of algorithms is becoming more and more important, you can use the code you write to help high-quality content surface better, prevent false content from being displayed, and change the face of the information environment.
If you are the boss of new information media, you can explore a path that takes into account both business interests and social responsibility, and earn money standing up.
If you are an investor in new media, by comprehensively examining and selecting investment targets, and abandoning those projects that produce information-poisoned milk powder, the capital in your hands can not only create greater commercial value, but also create huge social value. As Silicon Valley entrepreneurs often say, make the world a better place.
If you are a teacher of journalism and communication, you can teach students—not only journalism and communication students, but also students of all majors in the school—how to improve their media literacy and information literacy in the new media environment.
If you're an information consumer (which we all are), you can make smarter choices about your information recipes, care for your mind as you care for your body, and choose healthier food for the mind. You should read and forward real news, and support institutions and individuals that produce high-quality content; you should have a more prudent and critical attitude towards the authenticity of online information, form basic judgments on the quality of sources, and learn basic verification technology.
To paraphrase an already overused phrase: "Where you stand is your China". The information you choose to read and disseminate creates your information environment. How you choose, the information environment will change. If you are a wise information consumer and support good content, the information environment will get better and better. If you are a melon eater and indulge in headline parties and fake news, the information environment will only get worse.
Fake news itself runs fast, coupled with the boost of technology and capital, the gap between true and false news is even greater. Therefore, in this era, to make the information environment we live in better, everyone needs to take action, because things will not get better by themselves.