Blog Post #4

gabriellev

For this blog post research, I focused on the part of my inquiry question that asks why misinformation spreads more quickly than accurate content and how this affects public discourse. Before looking into this I had the idea that the explanation was more about how people choose to post false information and people being gullible to what they see, but it turned out to be more connected to how platforms reward the content like I mentioned in my last blog post.

As I previously mentioned, research shows that certain content such as emotionally charged content spreads faster. This is because people react to the video with an emotional reaction and it is human nature to then share that or verbally react to it through comments. Usually accurate information may be less outrageous and therefore doesn’t get the same instant reaction. This means that it isn’t actually completely accurate to say misinformation spread more, it is that emotionally charged content spread more, whether it is accurate or misinformation. This was surprising to me as I just assumed it was based more on the content. 

The other part of it is headlines, which add to the shock value of viral content. From what I have seen most of the time when content goes viral and is inaccurate it is because they were an attracting headline or opening clip. False information is often more shocking and therefore people are curious or want to share it to receive that same shock from others, whereas accurate information may be less flashy or intriguing (Vosoughi et al., 2018). This made me wonder whether or not there is a way to have the algorithm sift through content better to prevent content that could spread misinformation. I know they are doing this more and more with AI-generated content. For example on TikTok there are tags on content that is AI-generated. 

This changes public discourse, because when misinformation becomes increasingly more popular it changes what people think others are talking about. If content that is misinformation is spread, people will talk about it more, again because it has that element of a reaction. It changes the discussion to have a more emotional reaction which usually creates divides between people. 

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