How Fake Content Spreads

Social media has grown exponentially over the years. With the growth of social media being this large there are bound to be some people who want to cause chaos and confusion during your day. People can do this by creating fake content and posting it to social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit for the people with the untrained eye to believe it and continue to spread it around. This can be a problem within social media because people can spread the lies and hoaxes, while keeping all the real news at the bottom of the barrel for nobody to see.

If everything starts at the bottom why do the lies get spread faster than the truth you might ask yourself? Media Shift is trying to educate people in the world of journalism. They wrote created a blog titled “How Lies Spread Faster than Truth: A study of Viral Content” about how fake content spreads so much faster than real content. In the article they give a few reason why.

1. “Many news sites apply little or no basic verification to the claims they pass on. The story’s point of origin, once traced back through the chain of links, is often something posted on social media or a thinly sourced claim from a person or entity.
2. Lack of verification makes journalists easy marks for hoaxsters and others who seek to gain credibility and traffic by getting the press to cite their claims and content.
3. News organizations are inconsistent at best at following up on the rumors and claims they offer initial coverage. The potential for traffic is also greatest when a claim or rumor is new. So journalists jump fast, and frequently, to capture traffic. Then they move on.
4. News organizations reporting rumors and unverified claims often do so in ways that bias the reader toward thinking the claim is true.
5. News organizations utilize a range of hedging language and attribution formulations to convey that information they are passing on is unverified. These subtleties result in misinformed audiences.”(Craig.2015)

Many people like to share what they want to hear, whether it be real or fake it doesn’t matter to them. This can be a problem because most of the time fake content is created just for what the people want to hear. A few examples of fake content posts could be funny “Pig Rescues Goat”, or to create awareness “Mexican Red Rump Tarantula Missing in Brooklyn”, and even just random information “Post a Facebook Copyright Status to Protect Your Information”. Fake content can be a cause for concern (as discussed in a separate blog entry) as it can be filled with scammers and con artists trying to get personal gains. 




Craig.S(2015.February),How Lies Spread Faster Than Truth: A Study of Viral Content Retrieved from http://mediashift.org/2015/02/how-lies-spread-faster-than-truth-a-study-of-viral-content/