How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study

First off this is terrifying. Additionally I was realizing the other day I thought of another reason fake news might resonate so quickly with people that doesn't get brought up as much (not that I think I've had a novel idea of course, it probably isn't true or has been brought up and I haven't seen it): fake news has little nuance.

Its part of what I think makes conspiracy theories so attractive, they give the impression that no matter what else is going on, someone is in control and things happen for a reason. I think the alternative that nobody is in control at all is even more scary for some people (maybe all people).

I don't think it is entirely that fake news fits into your own viewpoint already, I have some "friends" on facebook that sometimes share fake-right news that aren't even really right wing, they are just kind of gullible (I hate to say that but they also fell for the fake wireless-charger video going around. Luckily that one was a little easier to debunk). The fake news would be so simple and digestible, without any nuance or subtlety that it might subconsciously be immediately favored over a more nuanced story. I don't dispute any of the other analyses going around but I think the simplicity of fake news can't be ignored and we need to remind our friends and family that the world is complex and very few stories are so straightforward.

The amount of attention that fake news are receiving from traditional media _AFTER_ the elections is astonishing... almost as if they wanted to blame fake news for the results of the election and the failure of their own forecast

Why were they not so active about this phenomenon during elections? I doubt they were unaware of it since even I saw many tweets that were obviously fake

I agree with something Ben Thompson said on his podcast Exponent — fake news is a problem intimated tied to Facebook as a platform and the filter bubbles that most people create for themselves. This material functions less as news, per se, and more as performative identity affirmation.

It's funny how the next big idea for the news media to get on board with starts at the New York Times and then filters it's way down the food chain through the less influential newspapers, CNN, and other mainstream news outlets, etc. It's sad that nobody is coming up with their own material much any more among the big networks. The agenda is set and it's all just a bunch or mstaphorical retweets.

It's like there's some board somewhere that comes up with the next big thing we are going to try and sell to the American people on and they publish it in the NYT and then the whole mainstream dutifully jumps on board and it gets pushed and pushed by all the networks until they give up or they move onto something else.

Searching news archives, one could build a nice directed timeline of the genesis and bloom through the media of these regular campaigns.

Americans apparently don't learn how to think in their many years of compulsory schooling. They can apparently be shown pictures of unmarked buses and be told to believe anything you want. I really don't know how you combat that. How can you try to show these people the truth when they don't have the capacity to discern fact from fiction?

read Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying. He lays out the bigger manipulation of the media. False blog posts get picked up by slightly bigger media sites. Then larger sites like Huffington post pick the story up. There is no validation of these stories.

In the absence of real news fake news will flourish. (turns out nature does indeed abhor a vacuum).

Censorship isn't a workable answer. The answer is for mainstream media to attempt to regain credibility by providing non-biased reporting and leaving off the propaganda.

This isn't an ideological statement either so please don't misconstrue. If you prefer, think of it as a strategy.

BTW.. I'm personally am sick of the "fake news" whining. I suspect I'm not alone in this. If it was a problem it was a problem a year ago.

I generally don't agree with Zuckerburg but in this case I do. Fake news didn't win the election. So please just stop it. Threatening forms of censorship isn't going to win more respect. Try behaving respectfully.

_Last article about fake news I intend to ever read or comment on_

"Fake News" is a Orwellian double-speak for alternative news.

Mainstream media lost its grip on propaganda and now they're trying to push for censorship of opposing views (this past election is the proof of that). Read this interview with the founder of Snopes for the background of this [0].

Never mind the fact that "real news" organizations have been caught lying so many times and have collaborated, behind the closed doors, with Hillary's campaign, for example. [1]

And they're also grouping WikiLeaks under the "fake news" category as well. I guess that's the punishment for exposing how corrupt the mainstream media really is.

[0] https://backchannel.com/according-to-snopes-fake-news-is-not...

[1] http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/meet-leftist-prof-who-wrote-hit-l...

I remember reading a great deal on Judith Miller, the Iraqi National Conference, and the selling of the fake news out of (originally) the New York Times that propagandized the American public into invading Iraq.

There's a number of ways that state narration becomes viral. The contacts that officials have with the media (the DNC leaks about media contacts pales in comparison to how the industry and government function together on a larger scale) coordinate messages, themes and ideas across distribution outlets - enabling large bodies of the American public to receive the same information (however fake it is or is not) in roughly the same time span.

This messaging is able to set the boundaries for the ideological debate. For instance, the Snowden Documents were reported across media outlets under the terminology "Bulk Collection" rather than Mass Surveillance, and they all made the same arguments provided to them by the state for what was going on, what was and was not legal and what data was and was not collected. Almost all of this was fake information that went viral immediately. American citizens had discussions about whether or not Merkle and Obama were upset with one another - rather than discuss the actual contents of the leaks, which the media broadly did no technical reporting on.

"Should we set up safe zones in Syria, or should we put boots on the ground?" is a safe ideological spectrum to coordinate for the American public, but it's difficult to see private-public partnership on messaging the American people to include, for example, criticism of American regime change, the US led coalitions' support of al Qaeda/Nusra/Fatah/Sham and the Islamic State Group. Both context and opinion are narrowly scoped to present particular fake perspectives that ultimately leave the American public uninformed and anxious.

Virality in general, of course, is studied by the Department of Defense, and it's Strategic Communication in Social Media (SMISC) research effort has sought to create the operating conditions and strategies to control virality of information in populations (strategic communication or "stratcom" is a DoD term for propaganda, replacing the older terminology psyops).

I think we're going to see evolving threats and technologies to detect, thwart and control virality more and more in the future - and people volunteering to be part of those networks of controlled information because its default, cheaper, has a better user experience, or just plain has all the other people.

An anonymous blog entry titled 「保育園落ちた日本死ね」"Couldn't get slot for my child in nursery school, Japan should drop dead." got discussed in the Japanese parliament. The opposition party picked it up.

I wish political discussions were more evidence based, but I don't know how to do it.

I think the original fake tweet author's response to this is pretty revealing. He essentially retracts his tweet, while reserving the right to repost it again, and to post such false things in the future. Let's read his own word:

"While there’s no such thing as absolute certainty, I now believe that the busses that I photographed on Wednesday, November 9, were for the Tableau Conference 2016 and had no relation to the ongoing protests against President Elect Trump."

In other words, he is saying in that first sentence that he doesn't rule out that his original interpretation will eventually be proven correct. There's no such thing as an absolute certainty, after all! It remains possible that the 2016 Tableau conference and its 13000+ attendees were all an elaborate ruse to cover up an astroturf protest. We can't rule anything out prematurely! But he _currently_ believes that this might not be the case, in agreement with the overwhelming evidence. Currently.

"I don’t know that Donald Trump was talking about me (posted 24 hours after my post), but he’s among many with doubts"

Many people doubt this fact, in the face of overwhelming evidence, because people like Eric Tucker, Donald Trump and his campaign apparatus have spent the last year priming the public to believe crazy things that aren't true.

"Let’s not be afraid to say things when we aren’t completely sure"

Well actually yeah, let's just be afraid to do that.

"I value our ability to discuss with each other in a civil and respectful tone regardless of where our views may stand."

Except for that part where he gets up on Twitter and makes stuff up about people with whom he disagrees, and posts those made-up things as facts, he is totally 100% down with respect. Very respectful. None more respectful.

For reference the original tweet was "Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI"

The focus on the corrosive effects of money on the political system has hidden what looks like the real threat to the American constitution: the Internet. The founders understood the threat of monied interests pretty well--after all the problem was described by historians of the late Roman republic like Sallust. The mechanics of communication in social networks are completely different from anything in the classical world. It's a genuine paradigm shift.

Does anyone remember the Foundation Trilogy by Asimov? There's a point in the story where the calculations of the future developed by Hari Seldon are derailed by the arrival of the Mule, a black swan event that could not be predicted easily. It's hard to understand paradigm shifts when they are happening but it feels as if the US has hit a similar point where an unforeseeable event overthrows the stable equilibrium of the past 225 years. What happens next is hard to guess but the range of outcomes seems pretty broad. I don't think you can rule out the breakup of the United States.

Snow Crash combined with Selfish Gene and infection theory provides a neat mental model of what's happening. Basically you get a constant bacground of competing memes all the time. But since the competition is fierce, none of them becomes too powerful. The elections made a lot of people more susceptible to infections and ideas become to spread. The social media provides the number of contacts necessary as well as increasing the transmission likelyhood as it forms echo chambers. It all makes sense.

Something that can help people ferret out false news stories in addition to what has been discussed is to follow-up on stories or at least to be open to follow-ups. It is definitely as difficult as being critical of your own biases, as has been suggested here before, but this is at least one other step we can take to be less swayed by information which can seemingly confirm our biases.

I have an hypothesis that I believe predicts very accurately how information will be treated in this segment of the American political right-wing (hard to define, but Fox and the WSJ editorial page to the right-wing blogosphere to talk radio to it's many participants on social media). I invite you to test it out:

The NY Times is asking the wrong question; they implicitly acknowledge that it lacks predictive power: The accuracy of information does not predict if it will spread and be believed.

* Ideology predicts it. If information matches their ideology, they spread it and believe it. If not, they don't. I believe this is now taken to its extreme: Ideological compliance, not factual accuracy, determines 99% of 'truth'. No matter how factually unsound, they will believe ideologically 'true' information. And no matter how factually sound, they will deny and attack ideologically 'false' material. Consider climate change, as an easy example - factually undeniable but ideologically unsound. It's a full-fledged ideological movement, which seems an anachronism in this educated age, happening right under our noses..

I've been reading about Medieval philosoph, and I recognized the pattern. It's a per-Enlightenment approach, placing ideology (back then it was mainly religious dogma rather than political) ahead of reason as the test for truth. Note also the attacks on sources of factual credibility, such as serious journalists, intellectuals, academia, scientists, education in general, etc. Those sources provide factual accuracy, but ideological 'falsehoods'. Again, it's in some ways similar to what was experienced in the Enlightenment. Finally, note that leaders of this political group prove themselves not by knowledge, leadership, good decisions, etc., but by saying things that are both crazy by normal standards but acceptable by the ideology's standards - their and their followers priority is that they prove their commitment to the ideology.

....

Finally a couple caveats: 1) In a way it might seem obvious because everyone tends to believe things that meet their preconceived notions, but this is far more extreme - usually accuracy does have a large influence on people, including probably most people reading this. 2) Yes, some people behave similarly on other parts of the political spectrum, but the reality is that in 2016 there is relatively very large and very powerful movement on the right - IMHO it just elected a President and has corrupted major U.S. institutions such as the FBI.

How many posts about fake news and evils of Facebook will NYT write, and how many will end up on HN?

Yes, there are lying tweets out there and social media is designed in a way that makes spreading this stuff easy. As long as you have an audience that really wants to hear something, they will share your messages. But, really, this is neither new, nor surprising. And it's not exclusive to Trump supporters. It's not even exclusive to social media. Mainstream media also occasionally reposts each other's stories without fact-checking. (Remember Tim Hunt?)

Why is this suddenly a subject of almost daily articles? Did some editor wake up from a 10-year coma or something? (I'm being facetious, of course. It's obvious why.)

I remember several year ago mainstream media was singing high praise to social media during Arab Spring.

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Another thing worth considering is that the whole story started with a single Tweet from non-celebrity. It seems it wasn't even an intentional lie, just someone jumping to conclusions. Is that news? I don't think so, unless you want to count every blog post and every comment as such.

Does a re-post on Reddit or Facebook somehow make it news? I don't think so either.

At what point does a post from an individual become news? This question is important, because some people are already jumping on the bandwagon and demanding social networks to "combat" this, whatever "this" is.

The issue is that a lot of such stories are false, but some of them are true. No one in the pipeline is a journalist or an editor with incentives to do fact-checking. And everyone can always link to the original post, say "Joe Shmoe posted such and such on Twitter" and thus completely relegate responsibility for the content. (Modern mainstream media pulls these kinds of stunts all the time: http://pressthink.org/2014/05/democrats-argue-republicans-co...)

This entire thing is a fucking joke... Wait a second!

Ahhh... I see now, got your tin-foil hats on? Make sure you stock up because four years is a long time. Assholes.

Strange, so many fake news about Trump and he still managed to win the election somehow.

"Fake News"

Yellow Cake? Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

Said the newspaper spreading cheap pro-Hillary propaganda the entire election cycle.

already submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13000430 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999981

uh, no shit

NYT = fake_news(newspaper)

Looks like their site is using ads from Google, their party will be over soon.

edit: already banned by facebook, that was fast.

The trouble, of course, is who gets to decide what is "fake" and what isn't. Even history books get constantly rewritten because people change their minds about what is accurate and what isn't.

It's why professional historians try to stick with original sources, for example.