• Question: Does misinformation spread on social media differ from social media spread in person?

    Asked by anon-304025 to Laura on 12 Nov 2021.
    • Photo: Laura Joyner

      Laura Joyner answered on 12 Nov 2021:

      So this is a really good question as misinformation isn’t just a problem on social media / online! However, how the misinformation is delivered is clearly very different in these two scenarios. This technology as made it easier and faster to connect and communicate with other people (and often that’s lots of people at once!)

      One of the most important differences is that social media platforms are now designed in a way to prioritise showing you content that is “most relevant” to you. One of the most important measures of “relevance” is how popular a post is. So if lots of people like a post a friend created, the platform will see that as being an important post and put it near the top of your feed to make sure you see it. This means that when something is posted on social media that perhaps isn’t true or is in some way misleading, but gets a lot of engagement (e.g. ‘likes’) then the platform will quickly show it to more and more people.

      The problem with this in relation to misinformation spread is that posts can spread to a lot of people very quickly and can even go ‘cross-platform’ (for example, if you screengrab something you see in Instagram and then share it in whatsapp). By the time that it’s flagged as being a problem (and hopefully taken down), a lot of people might already have seen it or even created new posts that the platform doesn’t know about.

      But as well as the size and speed of how quickly something can spread, another difference is what users can do to help reduce the spread which might be tricker in offline settings. Firstly, we can avoid interacting with content that we think might be fake / misleading (even if that’s a reaction or an emoji to show someone we’re annoyed at sharing the content!). We can also try and make the platforms aware through their reporting tools and sending it to a reputable fact checking organisation so that they know this misinformation is currently out there 🙂

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