A group of researchers from the American universities of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Northwestern have proven that moral indignation How people feel when reading unreliable information contributes decisively to the spread of hoaxes and wrong data on social networks. The results of this research work, which was published this Thursday in the journal Sciencefurther suggest that attempts to mitigate the spread of misinformation online by encouraging people to check its accuracy before sharing it may not succeed and be ineffective.
The study concludes that social media posts containing misinformation cause more moral indignation than those that contain reliable information. He also explains that this indignation encourages and facilitates the spread of misinformation “at least so strongly Finally, research reveals that people are more likely to share misinformation that provokes outrage without reading it first.
To reach these conclusions, the researchers carried out eight studies with US data from Facebook and Twitter over various time periods. Specifically, they used more than one million Facebook links and more than 44,500 tweets from 24,000 users of the social network X, formerly known as Twitter. They also carried out two behavioral experiments which involved a total of 1,475 participants in order to learn more about the outrage related to the spread of misinformation.
The research also reveals that the way in which social networks classify the contents to show them to users can influence the spread of misinformation. It also concludes that it has been proven that indignation – defined as the mixture of anger and disgust caused by the perception of moral transgressions – is associated with greater participation on the Internet. Disinformation that provokes outrage spreads more due to the “algorithmic amplification” of content that is attractive, according to researchers.
Some of the results of the study published this Thursday in the journal Science coincide with those published this week by the magazine Nature Human Behaviorin which they analyzed more than 35 million of publications with links to news that circulated between 2017 and 2020. Specifically, the research concludes that 75% of users share publications on social networks without clicking the link nor read the content. This suggests, in principle, that the vast majority of users only read headlines and short information.
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