OPINION: Here are two things social media companies should do to prevent misinformation from going viral.
Facebook has been quietly experimenting with reducing the amount of political content it puts in users’ news feeds. The move is a tacit acknowledgment that the way the company’s algorithms work can be a problem.
Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere-exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.
Social media such as Facebook FB, -0.23%, Instagram, Twitter TWTR, +0.73%, YouTube GOOG, -0.57% and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you “like,” comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.
Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people, too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times someone is exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the urge to pay attention to it and share it.
First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which a social-media user can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers. Dialing down engagement What to do? Technology platforms are currently on the defensive. They are becoming more aggressive during elections in taking down fake accounts and harmful misinformation. But these efforts can be akin to a game of whack-a-mole.
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