Modeling Viral Fake News.

It used to be, people would open a newspaper, watch television, or listen to the radio to discover what was happening in the world.  If you were lucky, you might see it happen live on television such as during an earthquake when the world started shaking and you saw the newscasters dive under their tables for safety.

Now, news is more instantaneous with the use of social media.  You can see things as they happen because people can record and instantly post on any one of the numerous social media sites.  You can also see people add 2 + 2 to get 5 instead of 4 and this is when we see fake news going viral.  There are people out there who have worked out the math on why fake news goes viral.

First of all, the way social media is set up, just about anything can go viral due to the amount of information out there and the inability of people to fully evaluate every piece they see.  Most of these pieces of "news" include a video, picture, link, phrase, or other form of online information and the "reader" has to sort through so much.  Second, there is the amount of time people spend looking at any item so if it doesn't capture their attention, they'll skip it and share something that does.  Finally, the way social media is set up, it encourages  indiscriminate sharing.

Now as far as the math goes, social media uses agent-based models because individuals are the ones who share things.  This is the same model used to determine how disease spreads through communities.  If you were to visualize it, you'd see dots representing the individual and arrows pointing from the individual to others as they shared the disease or fake news.

Mathematicians have had to modify it a bit because the original model is for one disease not thousands of pieces of information shooting across the internet each day so they've had to include the probability of a person making a new piece of information or looking through things they've gotten before sending it on.  In other words, they look at the most likely attention span of the individual for sorting through all the messages before sending one on.

People have speculated that super connected people on social media are more likely to cause something to go viral but one scientist looked at that speculation and concluded it is not true.  She stated, most of these super connected people do not have time to go through all the material they receive and they certainly don't have time to send everything they might want to.

What is more likely is that groups or clusters of people are more likely to socially share, creating a social reinforcement of material because every time you see it, it becomes more believable.  If its believable, it has to be true right?  This is one reason certain pieces of fake news go viral.

Scientists and mathematicians are still working out the intricacies of this topic but they are getting closer.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.