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A study has found that the act of sharing content on social media itself blurs users’ judgment of whether the content is true or not. It is an analysis that the act of sharing distracts users and reduces their ability to judge facts.
Professor David Rand’s research team at MIT Sloan School of Management published a study on the content that ‘the social media environment interferes with fact identification’ in the international journal ‘Science Advances’ on the 3rd (local time).
A previous study investigated whether the social media environment can influence users to believe false claims as concerns regarding the spread of misinformation grow. Some studies have focused on design features such as algorithms, while others have found that the rapid change and emotional nature of social media can reduce users’ ability to distinguish fact from falsehood.
The MIT researchers designed the study to focus on how social media users’ ability to ‘share’ content affects their decision-making.
The researchers conducted an online survey of 3,157 Americans whose demographic characteristics, including age, gender, race and geographic distribution, were close to the US average. All participants used either Twitter or Facebook. Participants were shown factual and false headlines regarding politics and the COVID-19 pandemic and randomly assigned to two groups. One group was asked only regarding correctness or whether content was shared, while the other group was asked both, in turn.
The study found that even considering whether to share news content on social media reduced participants’ ability to distinguish fact from fiction. When participants were first asked whether they would like to share certain content, their ability to discriminate between truth and lies was 35% worse. When participants were first asked to rate the accuracy of news and then share it, their ability to discern facts dropped by 18%.
The research team explained that in social media environments, people’s willingness to share news content and their ability to judge whether it is true can be individually reinforced, but when the two are considered simultaneously, they do not positively reinforce each other. Contrary to the expectation that, when asked regarding sharing, you will be more judicious regarding content because you don’t want to share misleading news, the ability to distinguish between fact and lies because the question itself is distracting. It is an analysis that drops the .
“Just by asking people if they want to share, people are more likely to believe a headline they wouldn’t believe and more likely to disbelieve a headline that they believe,” said Professor David Rand. It gets mixed up,” he said.
Co-author Zeev Epstein, a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab, said, “As research has shown that social media platforms create an environment that distracts people, you can consider platforms that release content without sharing.” We need to think regarding developing a platform that allows us to make decisions and form the right beliefs.”
