Social Media Outrage Drives Viral Misinformation, Study Finds

According to a recent research, outrage makes misinformation travel faster because it provokes users, especially on social media. Misinformation creates more hype and that's why it gets shared more as compared to credible news. The author of the study, William J. Brady, says that understanding the psychology of misinformation is important so we can limit its spread. Most social media users love sharing news which aligns with the beliefs of their followers or groups they follow, no matter if the information is true or false. Many previous studies were done on how our emotions spread misinformation but this study talks about moral outrage that plays a role in spreading misinformation.

For the study, datasets from Twitter (now X) and Facebook were analyzed. On Twitter, the researchers analyzed 44000 tweets and 2400 responses to tweets which were linked to misinformation. On Facebook, the researchers analyzed one million shared links and the reactions to the posts. The data analyzed was taken from years between 2017 and 2021 as it provided researchers to find the consistency between reactions.

The researchers found that responses from misinformation on Twitter and Facebook elicited more outrage responses than in trustworthy news sources. On Facebook, the links of misinformation got more “angry” reactions, while links containing misinformation elicited moral outrage and were shared frequently on Twitter. It was also found that links with misinformation on Facebook were more likely to get shared without users reading them completely. It showed that as misinformation produced more outrage, it is more likely to get shared than trustworthy and reliable news sources.

To study more on these aspects, the researchers conducted two experiments among 1475 participants. In the first experiment, the participants were given 20 headlines, half from trustworthy news sources and half from misinformation news sources to find out which ones elicited more outrage in them. The results found that no matter if the headlines were trustworthy or not, the ones producing more outrage were more likely to get shared.

In the second experiment, participants were asked to tell how accurate they think the headlines they were given are. The participants named headlines from trustworthy news sources more accurate, irrespective of which headline evoked more outrage in them or not. It shows that even though outrage on specific headlines makes them more likely to get shared, it doesn't mean that participants couldn't differentiate truth from misinformation.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World