One-man army’s fight against fake news

What could have been a micro or hyper local issue, has suddenly gained enormous visibility with social media playing its part as a platform for ‘democratic’ expression. Having said that, while the access may no longer be a challenge, it is the hunger for acquiring and consuming information rapidly that has triggered the ‘fake news’ phenomenon. Data scientist Sinan Aral helps us understand the underlying reasons for the spread of false information as the appetite for consuming anything and everything that matters to an individual is on the rise.

Be it the elections of the largest democracy in the world turning into an ‘impeachment’ pot-boiler-like scenario to a socio-economic commentary dictating the fortunes of a country – it’s all out there in the open. If one assumed that Facebook was the peoples’ medium and had a monopoly like stranglehold in the social media, maybe reconsider. Platforms such as Twitter and new ones in the making, have expanded the scope of human expression.

Interestingly, Aral has found that false news exhibited significantly more surprise and disgust as compared to false tweets. Therefore, the case for his ‘novelty hypothesis’ has gained credence with users more enthused to share false information. His point is simple: “We measured the novelty of an incoming true or false tweet, compared to the corpus of what an individual test subject had seen 60 days prior on Twitter. But that wasn’t enough, because we thought, “Well, maybe false news is more novel in an information-theoretic sense, but maybe people don’t perceive it as more novel.” Incidentally, it has even been argued that bots could be the reason for the spread of false news. Aral is quick to point out that while bots may be used to accelerate the dissemination of information, it is the humans, who have been busy developing cutting-edge technologies, to counter the spread of the news. He offers five strategies to handle the surge in fake news. One such is the ability to “depress the spread of such information,” thereby reducing “the economic incentive to produce it at all in the first place.” If this has piqued your interest, don’t wait to learn as to how the other formulae can work to snuff out the spread of the fake news. Aral in this Ted Talk, has done his part, backing his expressions by research and data, that will lead us to build a strong and rightly-informed society globally.