14 ms·

Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of fake news

317 points by cainxinth 2y ago

MildlySerious 2y ago
During the pandemic it came down to just a few singular accounts, apparently.[1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
cess11 2y ago
'“I do not see a lot of benefit in allowing people to send unrestricted amounts of retweets in a day,” Grinberg says.' I do not see a lot of benefit in allowing Grinberg to speak on policy matters.
- helpfulContrib 2y ago
  [dead]
derekbreden 2y ago
Anecdotally, I’ve paid to promote a number of tweets over the last few years, and have consistently found that there is a certain percentage of users that are apparently retweeting absolutely everything in their feed. My content is niche, and usually has a very small audience, and so these “blind retweeters” stick out like a sore thumb when I look into who does anything with my tweet. The behavior I’ve observed is consistent with the article, in that the timings of their flood of retweets could very well indicate a real human pressing the buttons, and I suspect they are. And, it does not surprise me that when looking at the long tail of the most absurd fake news that has a small audience on an individual tweet level, that one would find the majority of the retweets for such obvious fakeness is coming from such blind retweeters. The effect overall is that whatever bubble such users are in gets amplified a bit, absurdity and all, though I’m skeptical they play any role at all in what becomes truly popular. The real problem is far more nuanced with the less obvious fake news that even those not tapping blindly are taken in by, the less obvious fake news that gets a large audience because a lot of people find it believable, hoaxes that persist in the collective unconscious long after their time in the spotlight has faded, regardless of any debunking or fact checking that played a role in its popularity dying out. I think the effect of these super spreaders repeating complete nonsense is minuscule compared to the effect of organically popular almost reasonable nonsense that truly goes mainstream.
- prox 2y ago
  I was recently reminded of the 1/9/90 rule : The so-called 1/9/90 rule posits that on a social media network or review site, only 1 percent of users will actively create content. Another 9 percent, the editors, will participate by commenting, rating or sharing the content. The other 90 percent watch, look and read without responding. This is my experience as well. So also true on HN, where are majority are just lurkers. (Hi there lurkers, good time to get an account! ;) I think if you are lurking you far more likely to just consume something without actively giving it a second thought. I think of the adagio that to really know something, you have to teach it (or being able to explain at least) and that doesn’t happen in passivity. It happens in dialogue.
  - b112 2y ago
    Likely more like 0.1 or even 0.01%, same with editors.
  - spacechild1 2y ago
    > I think of the adagio I think you meant 'adage'. 'adagio' is a slow musical tempo, which left me confused for a while :)
    - alwa 2y ago
      I kind of like thinking about those two words set against each other, though! Sounds like “adagio” is a contraction of “ad agio” as in “at leisure” in Italian, while the usual references suggest that “adage” might have a couple possible derivations. The main one being that it comes through French from the Latin “ad” + a form of “aio,” or “I say,” so in the straightforward sense “a saying”; another etymlogy positing a root in “adigo” as in “drive, force.” [0] [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/adage https://www.etymonline.com/word/adage
    - prox 2y ago
      I meant adage, I listened to classical music recently (more than usual) :) Thank you for the correction!
  - 2y ago
foreigner 2y ago
Personally I would prefer social media without the ability to "retweet" at all. I want actual original updates from the people I follow, not news (fake or otherwise) or chain letters.
- MenhirMike 2y ago
  That makes it harder to find new accounts to follow though. I would say that the vast majority of accounts that I follow were discovered because other people that I follow retweeted (or boosted in the case of Mastodon) them.
  - glandium 2y ago
    That's arguably what "the algorithm" is about.
    - 8organicbits 2y ago
      I think there's a marked difference between seeing boosts of the people you directly follow versus an opaque algorithm that shows you content from the broader network. The former puts you in control: you choose who to follow based on if you like their content and their boosts. The latter is usually tuned towards showing you content that will keep you on the site (and looking at ads), but isn't necessarily content you want to see. As commercial social networking sites become increasingly profit driven, they'll crank the algorithm towards engagement at the cost of everything else. In contrast, a chronological feed of content created by or boosted by the people you directly follow is not "the algorithm". On Mastodon, I discovered someone via a boost who had wrote a great blog post. I followed them but found my feed was now full of bird photography (their main hobby, and something I don't care for). I added a filter for "#BirdsOfMastodon" (or something), but there were still too many without that tag. So I unfollowed them and now I don't see any bird photos.
      - mcny 2y ago
        Also I recently learned that different people see different comments on the same Instagram post and they to me is something I’d never thought of about echo chambers. Like you could send someone an Instagram post and assuming Instagram has their history they might see different comments than you
temptemptemp111 2y ago
[flagged]
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
See also: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
cjdaly 2y ago
Did you see the article claiming Hunter Biden's laptop wasn't really Hunter Biden's laptop, but rather had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"? If stories like this, run by fake news sites such as NPR or NYT, popped up in your social media feed about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, they probably came from a tiny group of people with a massive impact.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
p1dda 2y ago
What is 'fake news' for one person is truth to another. What it boils down to is who decides what is the truth and whether they have the right to censor everything and everybody else. In the 90's, the internet came as a salvation for free speech because now everybody got to have their voice heard. I definitely don't like this trend of censorship, it's not what our western democracy is built upon.
- akie 2y ago
  It is not censorship to point out and correct falsehoods. Without a common understanding of the world around us, at least in terms of what is true or not, what hope can we have to come to a political consensus?
- gbnvc 2y ago
  No these superspreaders know what they’re writing is lies. I don’t really understand how holding people accountable for their actions is censorship, unaccountability is just censoring the victims.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    The problem is that if applied rigourously, this would also mean banning all mainstream outlets.
    - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
      What a ridiculous false equivalence. Before the russians invaded, Western mainstream media reported that the russians were preparing to invade Ukraine. Mainstream media [kremlin propaganda] in the russian federation mocked Western mainstream media and insisted that the russians weren't about to invade. The two are not the same.
- techsupporter 2y ago
  > What is 'fake news' for one person is truth to another. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Everyone from Daniel Patrick Moynihan all the way through to Mike Pence. There are some things that are demonstrably true and untrue. Society gains nothing, and loses much, by simply throwing up our hands and saying "well, nothing to be done!" in the face of this. > who decides what is the truth and whether they have the right to censor everything and everybody else That is one heck of a leap. Screaming the cries of censorship when faced with people who disagree--either on your point, your presentation of your point, or the facts underlying your point--is escaping to a place where your position is no longer the one being debated, it's the "terms of the debate." Thus, one no longer needs to defend their position; they can simply stand to the side and feign being the actual aggrieved party. > I definitely don't like this trend of censorship, it's not what our western democracy is built upon. It is not censorship. Censorship is not saying "you are incorrect about this and I am calling you out for it and encouraging others to take note of your being incorrect." Heck, censorship is not even being shouted down for one's beliefs. If you say something and other people yell at--or praise!--you for it, that's not censorship. This article alone says there is no active censorship since people can, and do, merrily spread incorrect statements and half-baked "just asking questions" that even the Weekly World News would have found too preposterous to print.
Barrin92 2y ago
"It also points to a possible solution, he says: “Simple limits on retweets would constrain the spread of this information while having little effect on the vast majority of users.” This is a good solution. I remember a while ago, I believe it was in India, WhatsApp limited the number of users you could share something with as a response to the platform being used for riling up ethnic violence. Putting an inhibitor on this cascading virality has to improve the sanity in any communication network. Individual accounts broadcasting at the rate of major TV news stations with no scrutiny isn't a combination that was ever going to produce something approaching the truth. The entire premise of how groups produce truth is through a representative wisdom-of-the-crowds effect. 0.1% of highly correlated users swinging every discussion is extremely pathological. Most glaring problem is of course that limiting your most viral users is complete anathema to the business incentives of any for-profit social media platform, so in particular I don't see it happening on Twitter.
rapjr9 2y ago
My aunt used to occasionally forward emails to me that were obviously part of viral messaging attempts. They would often be religious in nature, but they'd also sometimes have messages of racial hatred or political topics. They would say things like "If you resend this email 100 times then Bill Gates will pay you a penny per email when you have sent 1,000,000 emails! This is the gospel truth!". There would be a long list of other forwarded emails after that with the email addresses of all the other women who had forwarded that and other emails, so if you looked through that history there would be a variety of topics. "Don't break this chain or you will go to hell!" These retweet networks may be a continuation of a similar thing, playing on peoples religiousness to get them to spread false messages (mixed in with true messages). Here's an example of one of them, I've tried to preserve the unusual spacing: {start of message} Read all of this one, it is interesting!! Near the bottom--the part highlighted in green--will give you GOOSEBUMPS!!! You don't want to miss this! VERY INTERESTING- 1. The Garden of Eden was in Iraq 2. Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the cradle of civilization! 3. Noah built the ark in Iraq 4. The Tower of Babel was in Iraq 5. Abraham was from Ur, which is in Southern Iraq 6. Isaac's wife Rebekah is from Nahor , which is in Iraq 7. Jacob met Rachel in Iraq 8. Jonah preached in Nineveh - which is in Iraq 9.. Assyria, which is in Iraq, conquered the ten tribes of Israel 10. Amos cried out in Iraq 11. Babylon, which is in Iraq, destroyed Jerusalem 12. Daniel was in the lion's den in Iraq 13. The three Hebrew children were in the fire in Iraq (Jesus had been in Iraq also as the fourth person in the Fiery Furnace!) 14. Belshazzar, the King of Babylon saw the 'writing on the wall' in Iraq 15. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, carried the Jews captive into Iraq 16... Ezekiel preached in Iraq 17... The wise men were from Iraq 18. Peter preached in Iraq 19. The 'Empire of Man' described in Revelation is called Babylon --which was a city in Iraq And you have probably seen this one: Israel is the nation most often mentioned in the Bible. But do you know which nation is second? It is Iraq ! However, that is not the name that is used in the Bible.. The names used in the Bible are Babylon , Land of Shinar , and Mesopotamia ... The word Mesopotamia means between the two rivers, more exactly between the Tigris And Euphrates Rivers .. The name Iraq means country with deep roots. Indeed Iraq is a country with deep roots and is a very significant country in the Bible. No other nation, except Israel , has more history and prophecy associated With it than Iraq And also, This is something to think about: Since America is Typically represented by an eagle. Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages .... The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible) Koran ( 9:11 ) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle.. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; And there was peace. (Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?! I BETTER NOT HEAR OF ANYONE BREAKING THIS ONE OR SEE IT DELETED. This is a ribbon for soldiers fighting in Iraq .. Pass it on to everyone and pray. Something good will happen to you tonight at 11:11 PM This is not a joke. Someone will either call you or will talk to you online and say that they love you. Do not break this chain.. Send this to 13 people in The next 15 minutes. Go {End of message} There were a variety of common topics, religion, support for soldiers, funny stories about old people, pet stories, and then the odd political or social message.
bloqs 2y ago
[flagged]
graemep 2y ago
Fake news is hard to classify (unless you limit to obvious fakes with no reasonable room to dispute), and hard to sample fairly. This study is also limited to a single event. What is misinformation can be debatable too, and it can affect the results. For example, a study by Kings College London on Covid misinformation in the UK during lockdown looked at mostly very clear cut things (e.g. its caused by 5G etc) but also included the lab leak theory as misinformation. That shifted the results because they lab leak theory appealed to a different group of people (older, right wing) to the others (younger, left wing). I am pretty sure you would get different results in other countries, but my point is what you include changes the results. My personal experience of political misinformation on social media (mostly FB) is that it is subtle (e.g. quotes out of context to change their meaning, or with misleading commentary), sometimes originates from mainstream media, and comes mostly from the "left". However, that is because my friends, at least those who are inclined to discuss politics on social media, are mostly affluent professional British people who vote Labour (the historically left wing party). A hopelessly biased sample.
smusamashah 2y ago
Wasn't this the takeaway from the book "The Tipping Point". It talks about small number of people with lots of connections are the source of making things popular / viral. This is exactly that.
taciko 2y ago
[dead]
- defrost 2y ago
  Looks a lot like AI generated pan handling riding on the back of third parties with no real substance other than pleas for $$$'s The meconium spruiking account adds gravitas though ...
treprinum 2y ago
It's a well-known fact that a tiny focused group can have a major impact on the society; that's how many initially fringe progressive ideas were implemented, like LGBT rights. The problem of fake news is that some of them turn out to be true, discrediting whoever opposed them, casting doubt on the "arbiters of truth", giving further credibility to supersharers ("what if this person is right when we know official media lied to us in this and that case?"). Now we have even well-respected people that spent their whole life in the power circles like Jeffrey Sachs casting doubt on many official narratives. This further weakens the "truth" signal and increases confusion. I suspect AI is going to make everything worse fairly soon as well.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  AI text generation is going to be very strong at generating arguments for whatever position the user requests.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    This sounds like a way to make trial lawyers obsolete.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      Lawyers (especially as a collective) are well-placed to outlaw things.
      - euroderf 2y ago
        I can see a sci-fi flick where a SkyNet-style A.I. world takeover is blocked by a plucky band of loquacious paralegals.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - visarga 2y ago
HPsquared 2y ago
Same goes for real news, and everything else. Power law distribution.
sethammons 2y ago
Way back, like waaaaay back, you can imagine strangers meet out in the wilderness, each wary of the other. To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. Where you are from, who you know, do we know the same people, do you lie, etc. "Ah, you know the Baker and are traveling through here to trade with them." Early webs of trust were on personal knowledge of others. I think a similar web of trust needs to reemerge. Vouching and relationships and when the vouchee messes up it affects the voucher. Imagine if your relationship graph could crumble when you let someone into the circle of trust who ends up a wolf. If you could cut out whole circles of trust when they are compromised, we could maybe get more authentic web back. See shit ads or blog spam, penalize the circle that houses it by no longer seeing its content. Many smaller circles join to other circles, where irl know people in the first circle. Like a new take on web rings. If your only portal to the internet was through your rings and related rings, we may get echo chambers but we may also gain the ability to remove bad actors from our immediate rings. Fake news propaganda? Penalized the ring and all members until that wolf is removed. #MorningThoughts.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  > To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. They'd just wear nice clothes and be well groomed enough, bonus point if they're in uniform, and everybody would trust them. Knowing who to trust has never been our forte.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  We've lived in mass societies for more than a century. Individuals do not exist anymore, since all people are mainly formed by mass media and mass indoctrination in schools. The few individuals that exist can weild oversized influence, for example as super sharers.
- xyst 2y ago
  Reminds me of the “Social Credit System” in China
  - pennomi 2y ago
cies 2y ago
[flagged]
- kmudrick 2y ago
  > Whitehouse lied about Burisma kick backs You fell for Grassley's and Comer's lies. Not cool to spread misinformation on HN either: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-burisma-fd1023/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-burisma-fd1023/
  - brainphreeze 2y ago
    Snopes is part of the problem, not a solution at all
gverrilla 2y ago
EDIT: changed my mind
- epgui 2y ago
  It’s not fake news. They’re telling you exactly what they did. It’s called a caveat. Edit: kudos for being reasonable and changing your mind! :)
- throwawayqqq11 2y ago
  Consider the fact that they only looked at twitter a scientific limitation too. > On twitter is litterally in the papres title, they dont claim to represent public discourse in its entirety. > Limitations and future directions > Several limitations should be noted. First, our sample may contain systematic differences from a fully representative sample. Your argument is nothing but a fluffy ad hoc reaction which ironically imho enables these supersharers.
- baxtr 2y ago
  It’s called X now!
- bozey07 2y ago
  Even less clickbaity title: Most Republicans didn't share misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Twitter.
- kmudrick 2y ago
  I mean the subtitle at the very top of the article literally says "Less than 1% of Twitter users posted 80% of misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election" so it seemed pretty clear to me. No fake news here.
jmyeet 2y ago
I want to highlight another aspect to this that doesn't seem to be mentioned: reddit. We all know about adding "reddit" or "site:reddit.com" as a search term. So does Google. We saw in the recent leaks how Google is increasingly value reddit as a source. Why do we do this? Because it's one of the few remaining places that isn't completely astroturfed. But this is a temporary situation. You can see this on any controversial topic. It is incredibly easyto hijack a subreddit or simply change what bubbles by brigading posts. This can be with real people (usually coordinated via a Discord) or with bots. This is not simply a bot detection problem. It might be viewable as a voting ring problem but I have my doubts. Depending on the size of the subreddit this may only take dozens of people acting in concert. Even larger subreddits may only take a few hundred. But such a group can completely change what posts make it to the top and also what comments on each post make it to the top. My point here is taht many on HN and elsewhere like to bemoan "fake news" on social media, which is a real problem to be sure. But at the same time they will extoll the virtues of reddit. The only difference is they're either unaware of reddit manipulation or it hasn't happened to their favorite subreddits yet.
hallqv 2y ago
E.g. msnbc, New York Times, cnn
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
admissionsguy 2y ago
An alternative solution is to abolish universal suffrage. Re-introduce wealth requirement since people who are able to accumulate wealth tend to see the world as it is. Then we don't have to worry about the vagaries of the poor & gullible anymore.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Re-introduce wealth requirement since people who are able to accumulate wealth tend to see the world as it is. … Ever met any rich people? There are some seriously confused rich people out there, let me tell you.
throwaway115 2y ago
"How do we stop people from sharing (what I deem to be) fake news?" is the wrong question. The right question is "How do we give people the tools to identify fake news?" If you give people the tools and they still spread what you deem to be fake news, then you've done what you can. Tough cookies for you. Too many people get very angry that people share things they disagree with, and then start talking about clamping down on communication. No, sorry, but your ideas lost. People are allowed to think and share things that make you angry. If your views aren't mainstream, there's a reason for that. "Fake news" is only a tiny part of the equation. If you pick up that censorship weapon, that we all implicitly agree to not use, you will not be the last to wield it.
- yosito 2y ago
  You can identify fake news to people, and unless someone from their "tribe" identifies it, they will just say that the party identifying it is fake.
  - throwaway115 2y ago
    So then you need to come to terms with people rejecting what you want them to believe. Some people won't believe you no matter what. Does that mean you get to reach for another tool, like force, or censorship? No, it means you need to accept that you don't control people.
    - croes 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - throwaway115 2y ago
        >We take away your freedom and put you in jail. The ACLU has defended literal neo-Nazis and white supremacists right to rally and share their ideas on several occasions. Sounds like you would disagree with them, and that people should be imprisoned for having disgusting and hateful ideas. Fortunately, you're wrong. Don't conflate words with actions like hurting someone. There are very narrow restrictions on speech, mostly around calls or threats of imminent violence. But those are extremely rare cases, and they're not what you are broadly describing.
the_real_cher 2y ago
Theres no way to get rid of "fake news". And nor would you want to as many times what people mean by fake news is dissenting news. The key is to educate people to think for themselves and question everything.
- gnz11 2y ago
  Highly educated people get hoodwinked by "fake news" and pseudoscience all the time though. I don't have a solution and education is certainly a step forward but the issue is much more complex.
- dahart 2y ago
  This article is about misinformation, not dissent. I don’t know how many times people think fake news means dissent rather than misinformation, but the term is defined to mean misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news It is a pretty common tactic for the spreaders of true misinformation to claim their position is dissent rather than lying, that they are the underdog and being ostracized for dissenting… Getting you to question everything is part of what they want. The goal of misinformation is mistrust. It’s too difficult to question everything, see e.g., Brandolini’s Law. I don’t know what the solution is, but I personally know highly educated people myself who are stuck in the misinformation rabbit hole. The problem with mistrust and conspiracy theory is that once it takes hold, it breaks people’s ability to evaluate trustworthy and even scientific sources. Don’t assume education is the key. Fake news is very, very effective, which is why they are doing it.
  - the_real_cher 2y ago
    > It is a pretty common tactic for the spreaders of true misinformation to claim their it's also a common tactic of people to label things they don't agree with as misinformation... > Getting you to question everything is part of what they want. What is the alternative you're proposing here? Blind belief? If you do respond can you try to keep it short and sweet and in a single paragraph.
    - 2y ago
mcmoor 2y ago
*Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of news. I bet that's what a further study will conclude.
- Chikatorma 2y ago
  After that > Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of democracy
gmerc 2y ago
Facebook figured this out too a long time ago when building news tab. But unfortunately they also saw that these people were 90% aligned with the same political party and Joel Kaplan helped Zuck understand that actioning it would mean declaring war on the party. So Zuck tucked his tail. Proving once again that most of our problems today are not tech problems and don’t have tech solutions but are societal in nature. We know what to do on climate change, we just don’t like the tradeoff. Or more precisely our governmental systems can not overcome the resistance because we forgot to incentivize long term survival. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/25/facebook-fatal-flaw-technologists-lobbyists-516927 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/25/facebook-fatal-flaw... We know what to do about misinformation. We know what to do about micro plastics pollution We know what to do about antibiotic resistance We know what to do about gun violence. So we hold out for magical technology fixes. The special trick in the US is that everything can be made a partisan problem, which instantly means paralyzing government intervention.
- plasticchris 2y ago
  This level of certainty is a bit frightening. We know what to do? These are complex issues with many trade offs and unintended consequences.
  - gmerc 2y ago
    My point - We don’t like the tradeoffs or consequences. Usually relating to our entirely man made economic system. What? Arrest Co2 increase in the atmosphere
    - plasticchris 2y ago
      So many points. Does your thinking start with “it is obvious that…” or “the right side of history” ? We as humans are just very susceptible to a combination of fallacy and social reinforcement, no matter our political stance.
      - gmerc 2y ago
psychlops 2y ago
Looks like the groundwork is being laid to dispute the results of the upcoming US presidential election if the wrong person gets elected.
DanielBMarkham 2y ago
We live in a reductionist world. that's not going to change. The other commenter is right, the only way out is better tooling. I can't tell the fake people from the real ones anymore, much less accurately judge information quality. That's the cesspool that ad-driven internet created and here we are, no exit in sight. I've worked with many organizations in crisis and on the way out. There comes a time that everybody knows they're in the endgame, but they march on anyway. People's actions become a bit like those in a Potemkin Village. The end days of the Soviet Union was like that. To me, the tools we're going to need to go forward have frack-all to do with coding. Small trust groups of real people, incremental sharing, overlapping interests and groups, devices that do one and only one things at a time (so that you and your social group can help you monitor your usage to optimize). We know these things work for humans. We've been doing them thousands of years. Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but these are the tools we need to move forward as a species. Tech can certainly help, but it can never even come close to replacing the shared social/evolutionary experience we all have baked in. I'm positive long-term about tech and progress, but just like any other massive change in tooling, we need to cut out the bullshit and re-adapt social norms. We've done this kind of thing many times before and hopefully we'll continue to do so.
ungreased0675 2y ago
This genre of research is disturbing to me. Researchers found accounts spreading ideas they didn’t like, tracked down their real world identities, and then recommended ways of silencing them. Please consider the implications of this activity, especially (inevitably) when it’s used to target communities we’re a part of.
- jfengel 2y ago
  That seems to deny even the existence of truth and falsehood. There's only opinion, "ideas they didn't like", and no chance that those ideas might actually be wrong. There's also kind of an odd contradiction. This is an idea you don't like, and suggesting it should be stopped.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    The obvious problem is that we do not know what's true and what's false until way later. We can tell "organic" from "forced", perhaps, but then the results will not be pretty for any political camp.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  The people dox themselves using social media. The study uses an established method to classify fake news. It's scientific, not stuff they don't like.
- Boxxed 2y ago
  This is not about stopping "ideas I don't like," it's about stopping "This shit is made up, and it's intended to be damaging." I do not understand why so many people cannot or refuse to see the difference.
  - Nursie 2y ago
    It’s bizarre isn’t it. We live in a world where people are slinging lies about the place, deliberately, for monetary or political gain. And yet a lot of contributors here see no difference between that and factual information or honest reportage. It’s distressing that so many people seem to swim in this mire of relativity, and see calls for truthfulness and adherence to reality as some sort of sin, an admission of bias and a desire to suppress the other side.
whoitwas 2y ago
We know social media is used to manipulate people. If you want unbiased news, look at AP, not Meta or Twitter.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
johnny99k 2y ago
Why does this article only show right-wing news as if the left is always truthful?
- mjmsmith 2y ago
  "As for sociodemographics, we found that supersharers were significantly more likely to be women, older adults, and right-leaning"
- arandomusername 2y ago
  Most of the time those researchers are left leaning, so they will focus on fake news from the right.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bell-cot 2y ago
Way back ~1990, when internet email was first being rolled out to non-technical employees at fairly-tech-savvy orgs, I noticed that there were a very small minority of people - yes, generally non-technical older women - who suffered from "Recreational Sharing Disorder". It didn't matter if the stuff was blond jokes, or "everyone has to pray for Katie, who has cancer", or "forward this 1,000 times and there will be world peace", or what. Obviously they had neither filters for credibility, nor good filters for respecting other peoples' time budgets and expressed interests. And as the number of connected users expanded, a tiny % of RSD cases could quickly generate enough email traffic to badly impact a site's email service. (Which was usually dial-up modem or fractional T-1.) Mathematically, it was very interesting. And with an occasional reminder from management, they could pretty-well control their RSD at work. These days, there's a toxic hot mess of politics and emotions laid over the whole situation. But it might be useful to recall that the underlying problem is mostly a network with a very large N, and the bell-curve distributions of certain human behaviors.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I appreciate the anecdote. The distinction I’d draw is that email was a push model, but today it’s platforms that decide what we see. If platforms wanted, I think it’d be trivial for them to make a setting for their users to filter out politics/outrage/whatever For example Reddit will (unprompted) put links to videos of police brutality on the home page when I’m not part of that subreddit. To me this anti pattern reminds me of putting candy bars in the checkout lane — pitting me against my self control on purpose
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    True, to a degree. But if you recall the 1987-ish to 2007-ish era - there was enormous growth in the anger-positive, fact-indifferent conservative talk radio and TV segment. Which was not 100% opt-in...but still far more so than most modern social media. Another anecdote: Back about 2002, an old friend of mine cut off all contact with a life-long, retired friend of his. In retirement, the friend-of-friend had been bitten by the Viral Conservative Anger bug - and refused to stop forwarding dozens of VCA emails to my friend every week. Similar for discussing any other topic on the phone, or ... (Pre-retirement, the friend-of-friend had been a highly skilled engineer, and had seemed to be a wonderful person.)
amelius 2y ago
I bet this is also how most religions started.
richrichie 2y ago
Federal Government (e.g. CIA) is a key spreader of misinformation.
stareatgoats 2y ago
The term "fake news" is so broad and fraught with ideological positioning, linguistic overreach, and self-righteous, naïve realism that it really ought to be banned. It does not do what it seemingly intends to do, which is to make people more critical of what they read and share; it does the opposite, just labeling sources as bad or good, which is as close to propaganda as it gets. A more nuanced classification than the "fake news/good news" binary is sorely needed.
- klabb3 2y ago
  It seems like a bad science yes, or perhaps editorialized by media. And completely unexpected that all information proliferation follow power laws. If they were comparing different categories of information (political, rage bait, technical discussions, neutral boring news) etc they could say something interesting. But this is such a narrow focus on a mostly value judgment based class of misinformation. It would be much more interesting to know how certain types of information differ from each other in terms of topological properties.
tibbydudeza 2y ago
Ignorance is strength - that guy was onto something.
causality0 2y ago
Interesting data but technically an orphan statistic. Who is it that's spreading the real news? The same group of people could be responsible for 80% of all news spreading and we wouldn't know from this study.
127 2y ago
There really should be a way to target and remove purposefully malicious communication from the open social platforms.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
slowhadoken 2y ago
Why is the author siting studies about Twitter from 2016 to 2019 but referring to “X users” when Musk bought the company in 2022?
emrah 2y ago
Services like Twitter which serve a very very large number of people have a responsibility to maintain a civil, clean platform. If the trouble makers are a small minority, it should be easy to cut them off then. And for those who will cry "freedom of speech", liberty does not mean everyone gets to do whatever they want. Everyone's freedoms are bounded by the freedoms of others
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
One of the most ridiculous behaviours of so-called "Big Tech" and its employees is to try to blame end users for problems. That certain individuals had a noticeable propensity for forwarding chain letters and other garbage on the early internet, from which they received _no economic benefit_, may have informed the tactics of today's "Big Tech" intermediaries but what these so-called "tech" companies do today is to _encourage_ this behaviour for their _own_ economic benefit. Truthfully, it goes beyond merely "promoting" sharing. The www user visiting a so-called "tech" company website does not _make a choice_ to share, like someone sharing e-mail chain letters on the early internet, the www user using a so-called "tech" company website _has no choice_. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-problem-with-facebooks-new-frictionless-sharing/245578/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-p... https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/facebook-s-frictionless-sharing-create-ads-facebook/232419 https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/facebook-s-frictionles... It is in the economic interests of the so-called "tech" company intermediary to _promote_ what is referred to as "viral" content. The quality of the content is irrelevant. If it is "viral", shared and viewed by large audiences, then it has potential to generate revenue for the so-called "tech" company. It has sufficient audience size and therefore it has value to advertisers. Thus, for example, one can visit the YouTube website to search for videos titles and descriptions that contain a certain keyword. As a result of so-called "tech" company tactics, the results of the search may contain videos whose titles and descriptions do not contain the keyword and in fact have no relevance at all to what is being searched for. The sharing of this content is not optional. It is being forced, without any voluntary user input, by so-called "tech" companies hoping to profit from advertising services. In sum, the so-called "tech" companies want end users of the www to be looking at the _same_ content. These intermediaries manipulate people who use their websites so that users look at the _same_ pages. There could be millions of people all wanting to view different pages but if each page has an audience of one this is not useful for selling advertising services, hence the so-called "tech" company will manipulate users so that they look at the _same_ pages. It is not doing this for the benefit of the people using the www, or even for the benefit of the "content creators", it is doing this for its _own_ economic benefit.
martin82 2y ago
I don't even need to open the linked article to know that when they say "fake news" they actually mean "facts that go against the current narrative".
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]

317 points by cainxinth 2y ago

During the pandemic it came down to just a few singular accounts, apparently.[1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...

cess11 2y ago

'“I do not see a lot of benefit in allowing people to send unrestricted amounts of retweets in a day,” Grinberg says.' I do not see a lot of benefit in allowing Grinberg to speak on policy matters.

helpfulContrib 2y ago
[dead]

derekbreden 2y ago

Anecdotally, I’ve paid to promote a number of tweets over the last few years, and have consistently found that there is a certain percentage of users that are apparently retweeting absolutely everything in their feed. My content is niche, and usually has a very small audience, and so these “blind retweeters” stick out like a sore thumb when I look into who does anything with my tweet. The behavior I’ve observed is consistent with the article, in that the timings of their flood of retweets could very well indicate a real human pressing the buttons, and I suspect they are. And, it does not surprise me that when looking at the long tail of the most absurd fake news that has a small audience on an individual tweet level, that one would find the majority of the retweets for such obvious fakeness is coming from such blind retweeters. The effect overall is that whatever bubble such users are in gets amplified a bit, absurdity and all, though I’m skeptical they play any role at all in what becomes truly popular. The real problem is far more nuanced with the less obvious fake news that even those not tapping blindly are taken in by, the less obvious fake news that gets a large audience because a lot of people find it believable, hoaxes that persist in the collective unconscious long after their time in the spotlight has faded, regardless of any debunking or fact checking that played a role in its popularity dying out. I think the effect of these super spreaders repeating complete nonsense is minuscule compared to the effect of organically popular almost reasonable nonsense that truly goes mainstream.

prox 2y ago
I was recently reminded of the 1/9/90 rule : The so-called 1/9/90 rule posits that on a social media network or review site, only 1 percent of users will actively create content. Another 9 percent, the editors, will participate by commenting, rating or sharing the content. The other 90 percent watch, look and read without responding. This is my experience as well. So also true on HN, where are majority are just lurkers. (Hi there lurkers, good time to get an account! ;) I think if you are lurking you far more likely to just consume something without actively giving it a second thought. I think of the adagio that to really know something, you have to teach it (or being able to explain at least) and that doesn’t happen in passivity. It happens in dialogue.
- b112 2y ago
  Likely more like 0.1 or even 0.01%, same with editors.
- spacechild1 2y ago
  > I think of the adagio I think you meant 'adage'. 'adagio' is a slow musical tempo, which left me confused for a while :)
  - alwa 2y ago
    I kind of like thinking about those two words set against each other, though! Sounds like “adagio” is a contraction of “ad agio” as in “at leisure” in Italian, while the usual references suggest that “adage” might have a couple possible derivations. The main one being that it comes through French from the Latin “ad” + a form of “aio,” or “I say,” so in the straightforward sense “a saying”; another etymlogy positing a root in “adigo” as in “drive, force.” [0] [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/adage https://www.etymonline.com/word/adage
  - prox 2y ago
    I meant adage, I listened to classical music recently (more than usual) :) Thank you for the correction!
- 2y ago

foreigner 2y ago

Personally I would prefer social media without the ability to "retweet" at all. I want actual original updates from the people I follow, not news (fake or otherwise) or chain letters.

MenhirMike 2y ago
That makes it harder to find new accounts to follow though. I would say that the vast majority of accounts that I follow were discovered because other people that I follow retweeted (or boosted in the case of Mastodon) them.
- glandium 2y ago
  That's arguably what "the algorithm" is about.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    I think there's a marked difference between seeing boosts of the people you directly follow versus an opaque algorithm that shows you content from the broader network. The former puts you in control: you choose who to follow based on if you like their content and their boosts. The latter is usually tuned towards showing you content that will keep you on the site (and looking at ads), but isn't necessarily content you want to see. As commercial social networking sites become increasingly profit driven, they'll crank the algorithm towards engagement at the cost of everything else. In contrast, a chronological feed of content created by or boosted by the people you directly follow is not "the algorithm". On Mastodon, I discovered someone via a boost who had wrote a great blog post. I followed them but found my feed was now full of bird photography (their main hobby, and something I don't care for). I added a filter for "#BirdsOfMastodon" (or something), but there were still too many without that tag. So I unfollowed them and now I don't see any bird photos.
    - mcny 2y ago
      Also I recently learned that different people see different comments on the same Instagram post and they to me is something I’d never thought of about echo chambers. Like you could send someone an Instagram post and assuming Instagram has their history they might see different comments than you

temptemptemp111 2y ago

[flagged]

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

See also: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

cjdaly 2y ago

Did you see the article claiming Hunter Biden's laptop wasn't really Hunter Biden's laptop, but rather had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"? If stories like this, run by fake news sites such as NPR or NYT, popped up in your social media feed about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, they probably came from a tiny group of people with a massive impact.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

p1dda 2y ago

What is 'fake news' for one person is truth to another. What it boils down to is who decides what is the truth and whether they have the right to censor everything and everybody else. In the 90's, the internet came as a salvation for free speech because now everybody got to have their voice heard. I definitely don't like this trend of censorship, it's not what our western democracy is built upon.

akie 2y ago
It is not censorship to point out and correct falsehoods. Without a common understanding of the world around us, at least in terms of what is true or not, what hope can we have to come to a political consensus?
gbnvc 2y ago
No these superspreaders know what they’re writing is lies. I don’t really understand how holding people accountable for their actions is censorship, unaccountability is just censoring the victims.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  The problem is that if applied rigourously, this would also mean banning all mainstream outlets.
  - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
    What a ridiculous false equivalence. Before the russians invaded, Western mainstream media reported that the russians were preparing to invade Ukraine. Mainstream media [kremlin propaganda] in the russian federation mocked Western mainstream media and insisted that the russians weren't about to invade. The two are not the same.
techsupporter 2y ago
> What is 'fake news' for one person is truth to another. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Everyone from Daniel Patrick Moynihan all the way through to Mike Pence. There are some things that are demonstrably true and untrue. Society gains nothing, and loses much, by simply throwing up our hands and saying "well, nothing to be done!" in the face of this. > who decides what is the truth and whether they have the right to censor everything and everybody else That is one heck of a leap. Screaming the cries of censorship when faced with people who disagree--either on your point, your presentation of your point, or the facts underlying your point--is escaping to a place where your position is no longer the one being debated, it's the "terms of the debate." Thus, one no longer needs to defend their position; they can simply stand to the side and feign being the actual aggrieved party. > I definitely don't like this trend of censorship, it's not what our western democracy is built upon. It is not censorship. Censorship is not saying "you are incorrect about this and I am calling you out for it and encouraging others to take note of your being incorrect." Heck, censorship is not even being shouted down for one's beliefs. If you say something and other people yell at--or praise!--you for it, that's not censorship. This article alone says there is no active censorship since people can, and do, merrily spread incorrect statements and half-baked "just asking questions" that even the Weekly World News would have found too preposterous to print.

Barrin92 2y ago

"It also points to a possible solution, he says: “Simple limits on retweets would constrain the spread of this information while having little effect on the vast majority of users.” This is a good solution. I remember a while ago, I believe it was in India, WhatsApp limited the number of users you could share something with as a response to the platform being used for riling up ethnic violence. Putting an inhibitor on this cascading virality has to improve the sanity in any communication network. Individual accounts broadcasting at the rate of major TV news stations with no scrutiny isn't a combination that was ever going to produce something approaching the truth. The entire premise of how groups produce truth is through a representative wisdom-of-the-crowds effect. 0.1% of highly correlated users swinging every discussion is extremely pathological. Most glaring problem is of course that limiting your most viral users is complete anathema to the business incentives of any for-profit social media platform, so in particular I don't see it happening on Twitter.

rapjr9 2y ago

My aunt used to occasionally forward emails to me that were obviously part of viral messaging attempts. They would often be religious in nature, but they'd also sometimes have messages of racial hatred or political topics. They would say things like "If you resend this email 100 times then Bill Gates will pay you a penny per email when you have sent 1,000,000 emails! This is the gospel truth!". There would be a long list of other forwarded emails after that with the email addresses of all the other women who had forwarded that and other emails, so if you looked through that history there would be a variety of topics. "Don't break this chain or you will go to hell!" These retweet networks may be a continuation of a similar thing, playing on peoples religiousness to get them to spread false messages (mixed in with true messages). Here's an example of one of them, I've tried to preserve the unusual spacing: {start of message} Read all of this one, it is interesting!! Near the bottom--the part highlighted in green--will give you GOOSEBUMPS!!! You don't want to miss this! VERY INTERESTING- 1. The Garden of Eden was in Iraq 2. Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the cradle of civilization! 3. Noah built the ark in Iraq 4. The Tower of Babel was in Iraq 5. Abraham was from Ur, which is in Southern Iraq 6. Isaac's wife Rebekah is from Nahor , which is in Iraq 7. Jacob met Rachel in Iraq 8. Jonah preached in Nineveh - which is in Iraq 9.. Assyria, which is in Iraq, conquered the ten tribes of Israel 10. Amos cried out in Iraq 11. Babylon, which is in Iraq, destroyed Jerusalem 12. Daniel was in the lion's den in Iraq 13. The three Hebrew children were in the fire in Iraq (Jesus had been in Iraq also as the fourth person in the Fiery Furnace!) 14. Belshazzar, the King of Babylon saw the 'writing on the wall' in Iraq 15. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, carried the Jews captive into Iraq 16... Ezekiel preached in Iraq 17... The wise men were from Iraq 18. Peter preached in Iraq 19. The 'Empire of Man' described in Revelation is called Babylon --which was a city in Iraq And you have probably seen this one: Israel is the nation most often mentioned in the Bible. But do you know which nation is second? It is Iraq ! However, that is not the name that is used in the Bible.. The names used in the Bible are Babylon , Land of Shinar , and Mesopotamia ... The word Mesopotamia means between the two rivers, more exactly between the Tigris And Euphrates Rivers .. The name Iraq means country with deep roots. Indeed Iraq is a country with deep roots and is a very significant country in the Bible. No other nation, except Israel , has more history and prophecy associated With it than Iraq And also, This is something to think about: Since America is Typically represented by an eagle. Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages .... The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible) Koran ( 9:11 ) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle.. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; And there was peace. (Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?! I BETTER NOT HEAR OF ANYONE BREAKING THIS ONE OR SEE IT DELETED. This is a ribbon for soldiers fighting in Iraq .. Pass it on to everyone and pray. Something good will happen to you tonight at 11:11 PM This is not a joke. Someone will either call you or will talk to you online and say that they love you. Do not break this chain.. Send this to 13 people in The next 15 minutes. Go {End of message} There were a variety of common topics, religion, support for soldiers, funny stories about old people, pet stories, and then the odd political or social message.

bloqs 2y ago

[flagged]

graemep 2y ago

Fake news is hard to classify (unless you limit to obvious fakes with no reasonable room to dispute), and hard to sample fairly. This study is also limited to a single event. What is misinformation can be debatable too, and it can affect the results. For example, a study by Kings College London on Covid misinformation in the UK during lockdown looked at mostly very clear cut things (e.g. its caused by 5G etc) but also included the lab leak theory as misinformation. That shifted the results because they lab leak theory appealed to a different group of people (older, right wing) to the others (younger, left wing). I am pretty sure you would get different results in other countries, but my point is what you include changes the results. My personal experience of political misinformation on social media (mostly FB) is that it is subtle (e.g. quotes out of context to change their meaning, or with misleading commentary), sometimes originates from mainstream media, and comes mostly from the "left". However, that is because my friends, at least those who are inclined to discuss politics on social media, are mostly affluent professional British people who vote Labour (the historically left wing party). A hopelessly biased sample.

smusamashah 2y ago

Wasn't this the takeaway from the book "The Tipping Point". It talks about small number of people with lots of connections are the source of making things popular / viral. This is exactly that.

taciko 2y ago

[dead]

defrost 2y ago
Looks a lot like AI generated pan handling riding on the back of third parties with no real substance other than pleas for $$$'s The meconium spruiking account adds gravitas though ...

treprinum 2y ago

It's a well-known fact that a tiny focused group can have a major impact on the society; that's how many initially fringe progressive ideas were implemented, like LGBT rights. The problem of fake news is that some of them turn out to be true, discrediting whoever opposed them, casting doubt on the "arbiters of truth", giving further credibility to supersharers ("what if this person is right when we know official media lied to us in this and that case?"). Now we have even well-respected people that spent their whole life in the power circles like Jeffrey Sachs casting doubt on many official narratives. This further weakens the "truth" signal and increases confusion. I suspect AI is going to make everything worse fairly soon as well.

HPsquared 2y ago
AI text generation is going to be very strong at generating arguments for whatever position the user requests.
- euroderf 2y ago
  This sounds like a way to make trial lawyers obsolete.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Lawyers (especially as a collective) are well-placed to outlaw things.
    - euroderf 2y ago
      I can see a sci-fi flick where a SkyNet-style A.I. world takeover is blocked by a plucky band of loquacious paralegals.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- visarga 2y ago

HPsquared 2y ago

Same goes for real news, and everything else. Power law distribution.

sethammons 2y ago

Way back, like waaaaay back, you can imagine strangers meet out in the wilderness, each wary of the other. To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. Where you are from, who you know, do we know the same people, do you lie, etc. "Ah, you know the Baker and are traveling through here to trade with them." Early webs of trust were on personal knowledge of others. I think a similar web of trust needs to reemerge. Vouching and relationships and when the vouchee messes up it affects the voucher. Imagine if your relationship graph could crumble when you let someone into the circle of trust who ends up a wolf. If you could cut out whole circles of trust when they are compromised, we could maybe get more authentic web back. See shit ads or blog spam, penalize the circle that houses it by no longer seeing its content. Many smaller circles join to other circles, where irl know people in the first circle. Like a new take on web rings. If your only portal to the internet was through your rings and related rings, we may get echo chambers but we may also gain the ability to remove bad actors from our immediate rings. Fake news propaganda? Penalized the ring and all members until that wolf is removed. #MorningThoughts.

makeitdouble 2y ago
> To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. They'd just wear nice clothes and be well groomed enough, bonus point if they're in uniform, and everybody would trust them. Knowing who to trust has never been our forte.
carlosjobim 2y ago
We've lived in mass societies for more than a century. Individuals do not exist anymore, since all people are mainly formed by mass media and mass indoctrination in schools. The few individuals that exist can weild oversized influence, for example as super sharers.
xyst 2y ago
Reminds me of the “Social Credit System” in China
- pennomi 2y ago

cies 2y ago

[flagged]

kmudrick 2y ago
> Whitehouse lied about Burisma kick backs You fell for Grassley's and Comer's lies. Not cool to spread misinformation on HN either: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-burisma-fd1023/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-burisma-fd1023/
- brainphreeze 2y ago
  Snopes is part of the problem, not a solution at all

gverrilla 2y ago

EDIT: changed my mind

epgui 2y ago
It’s not fake news. They’re telling you exactly what they did. It’s called a caveat. Edit: kudos for being reasonable and changing your mind! :)
throwawayqqq11 2y ago
Consider the fact that they only looked at twitter a scientific limitation too. > On twitter is litterally in the papres title, they dont claim to represent public discourse in its entirety. > Limitations and future directions > Several limitations should be noted. First, our sample may contain systematic differences from a fully representative sample. Your argument is nothing but a fluffy ad hoc reaction which ironically imho enables these supersharers.
baxtr 2y ago
It’s called X now!
bozey07 2y ago
Even less clickbaity title: Most Republicans didn't share misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Twitter.
kmudrick 2y ago
I mean the subtitle at the very top of the article literally says "Less than 1% of Twitter users posted 80% of misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election" so it seemed pretty clear to me. No fake news here.

jmyeet 2y ago

I want to highlight another aspect to this that doesn't seem to be mentioned: reddit. We all know about adding "reddit" or "site:reddit.com" as a search term. So does Google. We saw in the recent leaks how Google is increasingly value reddit as a source. Why do we do this? Because it's one of the few remaining places that isn't completely astroturfed. But this is a temporary situation. You can see this on any controversial topic. It is incredibly easyto hijack a subreddit or simply change what bubbles by brigading posts. This can be with real people (usually coordinated via a Discord) or with bots. This is not simply a bot detection problem. It might be viewable as a voting ring problem but I have my doubts. Depending on the size of the subreddit this may only take dozens of people acting in concert. Even larger subreddits may only take a few hundred. But such a group can completely change what posts make it to the top and also what comments on each post make it to the top. My point here is taht many on HN and elsewhere like to bemoan "fake news" on social media, which is a real problem to be sure. But at the same time they will extoll the virtues of reddit. The only difference is they're either unaware of reddit manipulation or it hasn't happened to their favorite subreddits yet.

hallqv 2y ago

E.g. msnbc, New York Times, cnn

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

admissionsguy 2y ago

An alternative solution is to abolish universal suffrage. Re-introduce wealth requirement since people who are able to accumulate wealth tend to see the world as it is. Then we don't have to worry about the vagaries of the poor & gullible anymore.

rsynnott 2y ago
> Re-introduce wealth requirement since people who are able to accumulate wealth tend to see the world as it is. … Ever met any rich people? There are some seriously confused rich people out there, let me tell you.

throwaway115 2y ago

"How do we stop people from sharing (what I deem to be) fake news?" is the wrong question. The right question is "How do we give people the tools to identify fake news?" If you give people the tools and they still spread what you deem to be fake news, then you've done what you can. Tough cookies for you. Too many people get very angry that people share things they disagree with, and then start talking about clamping down on communication. No, sorry, but your ideas lost. People are allowed to think and share things that make you angry. If your views aren't mainstream, there's a reason for that. "Fake news" is only a tiny part of the equation. If you pick up that censorship weapon, that we all implicitly agree to not use, you will not be the last to wield it.

yosito 2y ago
You can identify fake news to people, and unless someone from their "tribe" identifies it, they will just say that the party identifying it is fake.
- throwaway115 2y ago
  So then you need to come to terms with people rejecting what you want them to believe. Some people won't believe you no matter what. Does that mean you get to reach for another tool, like force, or censorship? No, it means you need to accept that you don't control people.
  - croes 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - throwaway115 2y ago
      >We take away your freedom and put you in jail. The ACLU has defended literal neo-Nazis and white supremacists right to rally and share their ideas on several occasions. Sounds like you would disagree with them, and that people should be imprisoned for having disgusting and hateful ideas. Fortunately, you're wrong. Don't conflate words with actions like hurting someone. There are very narrow restrictions on speech, mostly around calls or threats of imminent violence. But those are extremely rare cases, and they're not what you are broadly describing.

the_real_cher 2y ago

Theres no way to get rid of "fake news". And nor would you want to as many times what people mean by fake news is dissenting news. The key is to educate people to think for themselves and question everything.

gnz11 2y ago
Highly educated people get hoodwinked by "fake news" and pseudoscience all the time though. I don't have a solution and education is certainly a step forward but the issue is much more complex.
dahart 2y ago
This article is about misinformation, not dissent. I don’t know how many times people think fake news means dissent rather than misinformation, but the term is defined to mean misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news It is a pretty common tactic for the spreaders of true misinformation to claim their position is dissent rather than lying, that they are the underdog and being ostracized for dissenting… Getting you to question everything is part of what they want. The goal of misinformation is mistrust. It’s too difficult to question everything, see e.g., Brandolini’s Law. I don’t know what the solution is, but I personally know highly educated people myself who are stuck in the misinformation rabbit hole. The problem with mistrust and conspiracy theory is that once it takes hold, it breaks people’s ability to evaluate trustworthy and even scientific sources. Don’t assume education is the key. Fake news is very, very effective, which is why they are doing it.
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  > It is a pretty common tactic for the spreaders of true misinformation to claim their it's also a common tactic of people to label things they don't agree with as misinformation... > Getting you to question everything is part of what they want. What is the alternative you're proposing here? Blind belief? If you do respond can you try to keep it short and sweet and in a single paragraph.
  - 2y ago

mcmoor 2y ago

*Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of news. I bet that's what a further study will conclude.

Chikatorma 2y ago
After that > Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of democracy

gmerc 2y ago

Facebook figured this out too a long time ago when building news tab. But unfortunately they also saw that these people were 90% aligned with the same political party and Joel Kaplan helped Zuck understand that actioning it would mean declaring war on the party. So Zuck tucked his tail. Proving once again that most of our problems today are not tech problems and don’t have tech solutions but are societal in nature. We know what to do on climate change, we just don’t like the tradeoff. Or more precisely our governmental systems can not overcome the resistance because we forgot to incentivize long term survival. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/25/facebook-fatal-flaw-technologists-lobbyists-516927 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/25/facebook-fatal-flaw... We know what to do about misinformation. We know what to do about micro plastics pollution We know what to do about antibiotic resistance We know what to do about gun violence. So we hold out for magical technology fixes. The special trick in the US is that everything can be made a partisan problem, which instantly means paralyzing government intervention.

plasticchris 2y ago
This level of certainty is a bit frightening. We know what to do? These are complex issues with many trade offs and unintended consequences.
- gmerc 2y ago
  My point - We don’t like the tradeoffs or consequences. Usually relating to our entirely man made economic system. What? Arrest Co2 increase in the atmosphere
  - plasticchris 2y ago
    So many points. Does your thinking start with “it is obvious that…” or “the right side of history” ? We as humans are just very susceptible to a combination of fallacy and social reinforcement, no matter our political stance.
    - gmerc 2y ago

psychlops 2y ago

Looks like the groundwork is being laid to dispute the results of the upcoming US presidential election if the wrong person gets elected.

DanielBMarkham 2y ago

We live in a reductionist world. that's not going to change. The other commenter is right, the only way out is better tooling. I can't tell the fake people from the real ones anymore, much less accurately judge information quality. That's the cesspool that ad-driven internet created and here we are, no exit in sight. I've worked with many organizations in crisis and on the way out. There comes a time that everybody knows they're in the endgame, but they march on anyway. People's actions become a bit like those in a Potemkin Village. The end days of the Soviet Union was like that. To me, the tools we're going to need to go forward have frack-all to do with coding. Small trust groups of real people, incremental sharing, overlapping interests and groups, devices that do one and only one things at a time (so that you and your social group can help you monitor your usage to optimize). We know these things work for humans. We've been doing them thousands of years. Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but these are the tools we need to move forward as a species. Tech can certainly help, but it can never even come close to replacing the shared social/evolutionary experience we all have baked in. I'm positive long-term about tech and progress, but just like any other massive change in tooling, we need to cut out the bullshit and re-adapt social norms. We've done this kind of thing many times before and hopefully we'll continue to do so.

ungreased0675 2y ago

This genre of research is disturbing to me. Researchers found accounts spreading ideas they didn’t like, tracked down their real world identities, and then recommended ways of silencing them. Please consider the implications of this activity, especially (inevitably) when it’s used to target communities we’re a part of.

jfengel 2y ago
That seems to deny even the existence of truth and falsehood. There's only opinion, "ideas they didn't like", and no chance that those ideas might actually be wrong. There's also kind of an odd contradiction. This is an idea you don't like, and suggesting it should be stopped.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  The obvious problem is that we do not know what's true and what's false until way later. We can tell "organic" from "forced", perhaps, but then the results will not be pretty for any political camp.
whoitwas 2y ago
The people dox themselves using social media. The study uses an established method to classify fake news. It's scientific, not stuff they don't like.
Boxxed 2y ago
This is not about stopping "ideas I don't like," it's about stopping "This shit is made up, and it's intended to be damaging." I do not understand why so many people cannot or refuse to see the difference.
- Nursie 2y ago
  It’s bizarre isn’t it. We live in a world where people are slinging lies about the place, deliberately, for monetary or political gain. And yet a lot of contributors here see no difference between that and factual information or honest reportage. It’s distressing that so many people seem to swim in this mire of relativity, and see calls for truthfulness and adherence to reality as some sort of sin, an admission of bias and a desire to suppress the other side.

whoitwas 2y ago

We know social media is used to manipulate people. If you want unbiased news, look at AP, not Meta or Twitter.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

johnny99k 2y ago

Why does this article only show right-wing news as if the left is always truthful?

mjmsmith 2y ago
"As for sociodemographics, we found that supersharers were significantly more likely to be women, older adults, and right-leaning"
arandomusername 2y ago
Most of the time those researchers are left leaning, so they will focus on fake news from the right.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bell-cot 2y ago

Way back ~1990, when internet email was first being rolled out to non-technical employees at fairly-tech-savvy orgs, I noticed that there were a very small minority of people - yes, generally non-technical older women - who suffered from "Recreational Sharing Disorder". It didn't matter if the stuff was blond jokes, or "everyone has to pray for Katie, who has cancer", or "forward this 1,000 times and there will be world peace", or what. Obviously they had neither filters for credibility, nor good filters for respecting other peoples' time budgets and expressed interests. And as the number of connected users expanded, a tiny % of RSD cases could quickly generate enough email traffic to badly impact a site's email service. (Which was usually dial-up modem or fractional T-1.) Mathematically, it was very interesting. And with an occasional reminder from management, they could pretty-well control their RSD at work. These days, there's a toxic hot mess of politics and emotions laid over the whole situation. But it might be useful to recall that the underlying problem is mostly a network with a very large N, and the bell-curve distributions of certain human behaviors.

zug_zug 2y ago
I appreciate the anecdote. The distinction I’d draw is that email was a push model, but today it’s platforms that decide what we see. If platforms wanted, I think it’d be trivial for them to make a setting for their users to filter out politics/outrage/whatever For example Reddit will (unprompted) put links to videos of police brutality on the home page when I’m not part of that subreddit. To me this anti pattern reminds me of putting candy bars in the checkout lane — pitting me against my self control on purpose
- bell-cot 2y ago
  True, to a degree. But if you recall the 1987-ish to 2007-ish era - there was enormous growth in the anger-positive, fact-indifferent conservative talk radio and TV segment. Which was not 100% opt-in...but still far more so than most modern social media. Another anecdote: Back about 2002, an old friend of mine cut off all contact with a life-long, retired friend of his. In retirement, the friend-of-friend had been bitten by the Viral Conservative Anger bug - and refused to stop forwarding dozens of VCA emails to my friend every week. Similar for discussing any other topic on the phone, or ... (Pre-retirement, the friend-of-friend had been a highly skilled engineer, and had seemed to be a wonderful person.)

amelius 2y ago

I bet this is also how most religions started.

richrichie 2y ago

Federal Government (e.g. CIA) is a key spreader of misinformation.

stareatgoats 2y ago

The term "fake news" is so broad and fraught with ideological positioning, linguistic overreach, and self-righteous, naïve realism that it really ought to be banned. It does not do what it seemingly intends to do, which is to make people more critical of what they read and share; it does the opposite, just labeling sources as bad or good, which is as close to propaganda as it gets. A more nuanced classification than the "fake news/good news" binary is sorely needed.

klabb3 2y ago
It seems like a bad science yes, or perhaps editorialized by media. And completely unexpected that all information proliferation follow power laws. If they were comparing different categories of information (political, rage bait, technical discussions, neutral boring news) etc they could say something interesting. But this is such a narrow focus on a mostly value judgment based class of misinformation. It would be much more interesting to know how certain types of information differ from each other in terms of topological properties.

tibbydudeza 2y ago

Ignorance is strength - that guy was onto something.

causality0 2y ago

Interesting data but technically an orphan statistic. Who is it that's spreading the real news? The same group of people could be responsible for 80% of all news spreading and we wouldn't know from this study.

127 2y ago

There really should be a way to target and remove purposefully malicious communication from the open social platforms.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

slowhadoken 2y ago

Why is the author siting studies about Twitter from 2016 to 2019 but referring to “X users” when Musk bought the company in 2022?

emrah 2y ago

Services like Twitter which serve a very very large number of people have a responsibility to maintain a civil, clean platform. If the trouble makers are a small minority, it should be easy to cut them off then. And for those who will cry "freedom of speech", liberty does not mean everyone gets to do whatever they want. Everyone's freedoms are bounded by the freedoms of others

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

One of the most ridiculous behaviours of so-called "Big Tech" and its employees is to try to blame end users for problems. That certain individuals had a noticeable propensity for forwarding chain letters and other garbage on the early internet, from which they received _no economic benefit_, may have informed the tactics of today's "Big Tech" intermediaries but what these so-called "tech" companies do today is to _encourage_ this behaviour for their _own_ economic benefit. Truthfully, it goes beyond merely "promoting" sharing. The www user visiting a so-called "tech" company website does not _make a choice_ to share, like someone sharing e-mail chain letters on the early internet, the www user using a so-called "tech" company website _has no choice_. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-problem-with-facebooks-new-frictionless-sharing/245578/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-p... https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/facebook-s-frictionless-sharing-create-ads-facebook/232419 https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/facebook-s-frictionles... It is in the economic interests of the so-called "tech" company intermediary to _promote_ what is referred to as "viral" content. The quality of the content is irrelevant. If it is "viral", shared and viewed by large audiences, then it has potential to generate revenue for the so-called "tech" company. It has sufficient audience size and therefore it has value to advertisers. Thus, for example, one can visit the YouTube website to search for videos titles and descriptions that contain a certain keyword. As a result of so-called "tech" company tactics, the results of the search may contain videos whose titles and descriptions do not contain the keyword and in fact have no relevance at all to what is being searched for. The sharing of this content is not optional. It is being forced, without any voluntary user input, by so-called "tech" companies hoping to profit from advertising services. In sum, the so-called "tech" companies want end users of the www to be looking at the _same_ content. These intermediaries manipulate people who use their websites so that users look at the _same_ pages. There could be millions of people all wanting to view different pages but if each page has an audience of one this is not useful for selling advertising services, hence the so-called "tech" company will manipulate users so that they look at the _same_ pages. It is not doing this for the benefit of the people using the www, or even for the benefit of the "content creators", it is doing this for its _own_ economic benefit.

martin82 2y ago

I don't even need to open the linked article to know that when they say "fake news" they actually mean "facts that go against the current narrative".

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]