Adeola Adeyemo
It is 2018, and still there is a growing number of people who believe fake news as well as people who find validation from making false and outrageous assertions to a large audience. But why this number keeps rising remains unclear.
Researchers have attempted to find out the reasons behind this and one common conclusion has been reached by most of them – people consciously form their beliefs on the basis of information they assume to be correct, not what is true.
During the final three months of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Buzzfeed, the internet media company carried out a research comparing the popularity of false election stories against the legitimate ones on social media. It was revealed that the 20 most popular false election stories generated more Facebook engagements than the 20 most popular legitimate stories in terms of shares, reactions and comments. The most popular fake story of that period was revealed to be “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”
As such fake news gets more widespread, researchers have attempted to find out the reason why it spreads so fast, and how to stop it. Another research by the prestigious journal Science published in March 2018 investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Data used in this study comprised of up to 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people over 4.5 million times. It was concluded that “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”
This conclusion therefore postulates that even with the current political moment and trending news around it, we interpret new information as confirming our beliefs and reject it if it runs counter to those beliefs. What we believe depends on our personal views and ideas and this cuts across every circle or endeavor. Without extensive verification or evidence, people believe messages because they sound appealing and respond to their wishes and desires. They then seek to assert those beliefs on others, widening the pool of fake news consumers.
President Donald Trump joined this pool of fake news creators when he claimed that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. He made this claim without any evidence in March 2017, tweeting that there was massive voter fraud which allegedly resulted in the popular vote count favoring his opponent in the elections, Hillary Clinton, by almost 3 million. He went further on to form a task force to review alleged voter fraud, improper voter registrations and “election integrity” in the federal election system. That group was disbanded in January, and no credible evidence was ever presented to substantiate the president’s claims.
When it comes to agreeing with fake information, people have a reflex action and immediately accept it if it already agreed with their pre-set position of things. This was the conclusion reached by a study published in the Social Psychology and Personality Science journal in April 2018. Dr Michael Gilead, the author of the research, said it was even more noticeable when the false material was about politics and social issues: “This involuntary, ‘reflex-like’ tendency to consider things we already believe in as being true, might dampen our ability to think things through in a rational way.”
It often occurs, however, that one may simply not know what to believe. This happens mostly when a person is confronted with new and false information that he has very little knowledge about. Under this condition, one may be prone to believing such false information purely on a motivational bias.
This requires urgent remedy. The disinformation spate must be countered with persistent fact checking and steps to ensure the integrity of information being churned out to consumers of such information. Improving the quality of news sharing and journalism in general is cause for serious concern and requires a concerted effort from societal institutions and the public at large.
