Why social networks have become a perfect breeding ground for scams and misinformation

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but in an age of rabid populism and digital activism, these theories have gained the power to influence real-world events, usually for the worse. in 2013, Report of the World Economic Forum on Global Risks cited the viral spread of unsubstantiated or false information as one of the most dangerous social trends of our time, no less than terrorism. The rise of anti-democratic politicians throughout the Western world is evidence of the dangerous effects of the viral spread of misinformation. It's amazing how hard it is for people to differentiate between reliable information and scams. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in my country (Italy) the literacy level of more than half of the residents aged 15 to 65 is low. Besides, social media makes it easy for ideas, even if they are false, to spread around the world almost instantly.

Researchers in the social sciences have recently made great progress in understanding the spread and consumption of information, its influence on the formation of opinions, and the ways in which humans influence each other. Technological developments make it possible to take advantage of the flow of digital information from social media, i.e. all the traces that people leave behind on the net when they choose, share or react, to examine social dynamics at a high level of detail. This approach, the machine Computational social sciences, uses mathematics, statistics, physics, sociology and computer science to study social phenomena with a quantitative approach.

Using the methods of computational social science, scientists can trace the traces people leave on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other similar platforms and get a very detailed picture of the spread of conspiracy theories. Thanks to such studies, we know that unlike what was believed in the past, humans are not rational. When presented with unfiltered information, they choose information that is consistent with their opinions. As a result of this phenomenon, the machine Confirmation bias, patently false arguments are spreading: theories about huge worldwide conspiracies, about a connection between vaccines and autism and other nonsense. Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to break this cycle.

The reverberation box

My colleagues and I, at the IMT school For advanced studies in Lucca, Italy, we have dedicated the last five years to the investigation of the spread of true and false information in social networks. the research group It includes two physicists (Guido Calderelli and Antonio Skala), a statistician (Alessandro Besi, who now works at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California), a mathematician (Michela del Vicario) and two researchers in the field of computer science (Fabiana Zollo and Vani). In particular, we are interested in finding out how information becomes viral and how opinions are formed and strengthened in the online space.

One of our first studies on the subject, started in 2012 and published in 2015, aimed to find out how social media users relate to three different types of information: mainstream news, alternative news and online political activism. The first category is self-explanatory: it included the Italian media channels dealing with news coverage at a national level. The second category included sources that claim to report on things that the regular media "hides". The third category is content published by activist groups, who use the network as a tool for political mobilization.

Collecting the information for the purpose of the research, especially from the alternative sources, was difficult and took a long time. We collected and verified various indications from Facebook users and groups that are engaged in refuting scams and false rumors (Protesi di complotto , Bufale un tanto al chilo, La menzogna diventa verita a passa alla storia). Our study focused on fifty Facebook pages and analyzed the online behavior of more than two million Italian users whose activity was recorded on these pages between September 2012 and February 2013. We found that posts in completely different fields behave in a very similar way online: a similar amount of people responded to them in some way, shared them on social media and discuss them. In other words, information from mainstream newspapers, alternative news sources, and political activism sites had the same resonance.

Two hypotheses can explain this. The first is that all users treat all types of information equally, regardless of its reliability. The second is that users belonging to certain interest groups treat information of all kinds equally, and one is whether it is founded or not, provided that it reinforces their beliefs. The second hypothesis seemed more interesting to us, because if it is true, it shows that confirmation bias plays an important role in the spread of misinformation. It also shows that despite the optimistic opinions voiced thanks to "collective intelligence" and the "wisdom of the masses", in truth the network caused the formation of echo boxes.

The manager and the message

The next step was to test both hypotheses. We decided to compare the online behavior of people who read science news with the behavior of people who usually follow alternative news sources and conspiracy theories. We chose these two types of content because of one fundamental difference between them: the ability to identify the sender, someone who manages the message. Science news deals with studies published in scientific journals, works of scientists and recognized institutions. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, have no identifiable sender. They are designed to increase uncertainty. Their subject is always a secret plan, or a truth that someone hides from the public on purpose.

And there is another essential difference between science news and conspiracy theories. Whether they are true or not, science news belongs to a tradition of rational thinking based on empirical evidence. Conspiratorial thinking, on the other hand, appears when people find that they fail to identify simple causes for complex and undesirable phenomena. The very complexity of issues such as multiculturalism, the global financial system and technological progress may cause people, regardless of their level of education, to choose to believe in short and simple explanations clearly reserved for a guilty party. Martin Bauer, a social psychologist from the London School of Economics and researcher of the dynamics of conspiracies, describes conspiratorial thinking as "A quasi-religious mentality". It reminds a bit of the dawn of humanity when humans attributed storms to the wrath of the gods.

For the purpose of this study, which we called "Science vs. Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation" and that you were publishedIn the journal PLOS ONE, we examined 73 Facebook pages, of which 39 pages dealt with spreading conspiracies and the rest dealt with science news. All these pages combined had more than a million Italian users from 2010 to 2014. We found that both groups of pages attracted a very passionate audience: people who rarely left their echo boxes. Those who read the science news almost never read the conspiracy theories and vice versa, but the pages dealing with conspiracies attracted a three times larger proportion of users.

Conspiratorial thinking appears when people find that they are unable to identify simple causes for complex and undesirable phenomena.

Facebook's tendency to create sounding boards plays an important role in spreading false rumors. When we studied 4,709 satirical posts about conspiracy theories (for example: "The chemicals in the condensation trails from jet planes contain Viagra") we found that consumers of "real" conspiracy news were more likely to read these posts than consumers of legitimate science news. We've also seen that users who focus primarily on conspiracies tend to share content more.

When we analyzed the structure of the social networks of the two groups (science news readers and conspiracy theorists), we discovered a surprising statistical consistency: as the number of likes a person gives to narratives of a certain type increases, so does the probability that there is also a virtual social network consisting exclusively of users with the same profile. In other words, the more you are exposed to a certain type of narrative, the more likely it is that all your Facebook friends prefer the same type of news. To understand the viral nature of the phenomenon we must understand the division of social networks into homogeneous groups. These groups tend to ignore anything that doesn't match their worldview.

A bitter problem

In 2014, we decided to begin investigating efforts to combat the spread of unsubstantiated claims on social media. Does your rebuttal achieve its goal? To test this, we measured the "persistence" of conspiracy news readers who were exposed to refutations, that is, their tendency to continue focusing their attention on conspiratorial content. The results, which will be published soon, are not encouraging. People exposed to refutation campaigns were 30% more likely to continue reading conspiracy news. That is, from the point of view of a certain type of user, exposure to a refutation actually strengthens the belief in the conspiracy.

A similar dynamic was also observed in a study of 55 million Facebook users in the US. Users avoid cognitive dissonance by consuming information that supports their prevailing beliefs, and often share that information. We have also seen that over time, people who embrace conspiracy theories in one area, such as the (non-existent) connection between vaccines and autism, will look for such theories in other areas as well. Once they enter the reverberation box, they tend to embrace all other conspiracies.

The meaning of this dynamic is that it will be very difficult to stop the spread of false information in the network. Attempts to hold a reasonable discussion usually degenerate into fights between extremists leading to polarization. In such a context it is difficult to bring people real information, and it is almost impossible to stop baseless reports.

It is likely that social media will continue to be awash with debate about the latest global mega-conspiracy. In such an environment the important thing is the very sharing of the things that are hidden from us, whether they are true or not. Maybe it's time to stop calling our age the age of information, and instead call it "the age of wonder".