Politics might be one motivation for spreading fake news. But a bigger problem may be people trying to make a buck in a social media advertising ecosystem that rewards stories for attracting the most eyeballs, says study co-author Deb Roy, LSM’s director. “We’re discovering that polarization is a great business model,” he says.

    For its study, the MIT team perused six fact-checking Web sites-snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com and urbanlegends.about.com-for common news stories and rumors those sites had examined.

    “Then we looked for footprints of those stories on Twitter, including links to stories we investigated that were embedded in tweets, tweets about those stories without links, and photo memes related to those stories,” Vosoughi says.

    False information is likely more widespread because it plays on salacious or controversial elements in ways the truth typically cannot, according to the researchers.



kleinbl00:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Origins:_Pulitzer_vs._Hearst


posted 2235 days ago