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It’s no exaggeration to say that sharing misinformation on social media became a potentially deadly added benefit when the pandemic began. Inaccurate information about the risks posed by the virus, the efficacy of masks and the safety of vaccines puts people at risk of preventable death. However, despite the dangers of misinformation, misinformation continues to thrive on many social media sites, often lagging behind moderation and policy.
If we are to take steps to address this (which social media services are obviously not interested in), we need to understand why sharing misinformation is attractive to people. Previous research has shown that people care about making sure what they share is accurate, but often fail to do so. For many users, clicking “share” has become a habit and a mindless pursuit.
How vices become habits
People find many reasons to post misinformation, whether or not they mistakenly believe the information is accurate. may worsen the Alternatively, they can let allies know that they are on the same side or part of the same cultural group. It has been suggested that the information in the
The researchers created a fake Facebook entry for the article, including the title and graphics, and displayed it to users, asking them to decide whether to share it or not. The articles were evenly divided between correct and incorrect information. Overall, accurate articles were shared at a much higher rate (32% compared to just 5% for false headlines). However, the subset of subjects who shared the most stories (those with the strongest Facebook habits) shared fake and real stories in roughly equal proportions. As a result, only 15% of the participants were responsible for nearly 40% of his shared fake-him stories.
For researchers, this suggests that sharing false information does not necessarily indicate bias. Instead, it’s a matter of the subset of users who habitually only click share (habit is defined as including “limited remorse, carelessness”). So the team designed an experiment that asked participants to rate the accuracy of the headline before deciding whether to share it (groups made these decisions in reverse order and served as a control). This worked partially. The habitual Facebook sharer shared fewer false headlines, but still ended up sharing a quarter of her total.
The researchers then repeated the experiment, using headlines that either matched or disagreed with the participants’ self-proclaimed political affiliations (all headlines were accurate). A similar thing happened, and the non-habitual participant was seven times more likely to share politically favorable headlines than she was to the opposite headline. By contrast, those with Facebook habits were much less discriminating, with only three times as much bias towards politically compatible headlines as she did. Again, habitual users were far less discriminatory, even when prompted.
Incentive change
Many studies have shown that responses to sharing something (likes and even re-shares) act as rewards for social media users. This encourages people to adopt a habit of sharing, as sharing everything increases the chances of getting rewarded. Therefore, researchers changed the reward process.
During the training period, participants were assigned to share accurate headlines or incorrect information as point rewards (they received points for sharing what they were assigned). After extensive training, participants were asked to share stories of their choice. When participants were trained to share inaccurate information, they became shared as often as accurate stories. Accurate stories were shared approximately three times as often as incorrect stories.
Questions posed prior to training showed that those identified as habitually sharing information were more likely to do so primarily with the intent to attract the attention of other users and were less likely to share accurate information. were less likely to rate it as important to do.
Fortunately, many people don’t seem to be willing to share misinformation even when it favors their political views. But that’s about the end of the good news. The bad news is that social media habits seem to inadvertently promote misinformation sharing, and social media companies have very strong incentives to create addictive users. . Researchers also note that users may self-select to primarily follow politically biased news sources. Not necessarily, but the sources you can share can be very biased.
Either way, it’s trivial for social media companies to sporadically give users some kind of positive feedback in order to share accurate information. Basically, repeat the survey training often enough so that its effectiveness is not diminished. Research shows that doing so doesn’t actually reduce habitual use, but rather shifts the associated rewards.
PNAS, 2023. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216614120 (About DOI).
