By Stephen Beech via SWNS
Moral “outrage” helps misinformation spread through social media, suggests new research.
Scientists say Facebook and Twitter posts containing false information presented as facts evoke more reaction than posts with trustworthy information.
And, in turn, that outrage facilitates the spread of misinformation, according to the American study.
The research team also found that people are more likely to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first.
The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that attempts to stop the online spread of misinformation by encouraging people to check its accuracy before sharing may not be successful.
Study first author Killian McLoughlin and his colleagues conducted eight studies using U.S. data from Facebook and Twitter over multiple time periods, along with two behavioral experiments involving 1,475 participants.
The research team analyzed more than one million Facebook links and over 44,500 Twitter posts.
For the study, “outrage” was defined as the mix of anger and disgust triggered by perceived moral transgressions.
McLoughlin said: “We tested a hypothesis that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online, examining generalisability across multiple platforms, time periods, and classifications of misinformation.
“Outrage is highly engaging and need not be accurate to achieve its communicative goals, making it an attractive signal to embed in misinformation.”
The researchers found that outrage-evoking posts facilitated “the spread of misinformation at least as strongly as trustworthy news.”
McLoughlin, a psychology and social policy PhD student at Princeton University in New Jersey, said: “People may share outrageous misinformation without checking its accuracy because sharing is a way to signal their moral position or membership in certain groups.”
He believes the way that social media platforms rank content to show to users probably also plays a part in the spread of misinformation.
McLoughlin said: “Since outrage is associated with increased engagement online, outrage-evoking misinformation may be likely to spread farther in part because of the algorithmic amplification of engaging content.”
He added: “This is important because algorithms may up-rank news articles associated with outrage, even if a user intended to express outrage toward the article for containing misinformation.”
