Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How misinformation is amplified on social media | TechCrunch Minute”.
We’Re less than 6 months out from the US presidential election and now one of the candidates is a convicted felon. So here we go again with unprecedented times, but one thing that will be precedented about this year’s presidential election is that we’re probably going to be seeing a lot of misinformation on social media, at least this time around. We know a bit more about misinformation and how it spreads. Last week, the journal science published a pair of studies, proving one thing that we already knew and one thing that’s a bit more surprising. First, misinformation on social media does change people’s minds, but we kind of already knew that just from existing in the world.
What was more surprising to me at least, is that a small subset of super sharers, mostly older white Republican women, were responsible for 80 % of misinformation in 2020. That seems like a shocking claim, but the study which comes from Ben Gan University in nor Eastern was quite thorough. The researchers linked about 660,000 registered voters with their accounts on Twitter and found that just 2,000 of those accounts had an outsized impact on the spread of misinformation online. One of the authors of the paper near grinberg, told Tech crunch that there’s no way to be 100 % sure that these aren’t Bots but we’re pretty sure they’re legit.
According to the comprehensive analysis of these accounts, behaviors and in the other study led by mit’s Jennifer Allen, researchers found that social media did impact Americans likelihood to receive the covid-19 vaccine. You might recall that around the onset of Co, some social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter introduced flagging systems which would signal to users when they were being showed misinformation about the virus and vaccine efficacy. The MIT researchers found that these flags actually worked, but only if the misleading content actually was flagged and a lot of misinformation evaded detection. The study cites a particular example involving a viral article with the headline.
A healthy doctor died 2 weeks after getting a covid vaccine. Cdc is investigating why that Chicago Tribune, article was seen by over 50 million people which comes out to over 20 % of us Facebook users. That’S more people than there are residents of California. The initial story described the doctor’s death, as quote possibly the nation’s first death linked to the vaccine, but that’s a misleading claim to make, because, 2 weeks later, the article was updated to say that actually, a medical examiner found no evidence that the covid-19 vaccine contributed to The doctor’s death in the end, the examiner, found that the doctor died of natural causes.
This news is kind of a downer, but if there’s any clear takeaway it’s that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially as we get into election season. .