Impact of fake news, message and spam spread through social media on people decision making ability

Abstract

In the early days of the Internet, people argued that the Internet would enable greater transparency of information, which would increase the quality of democracies. The availability of information from various news sources would enable people to find their own information from non-traditional news outlets, and this decreased reliance on a narrow set of traditional news sources would improve democracy. Some might argue that there has been a decrease in the quality of democracy due to pervasive fake news on social media. A recent editorial in Science calls on the scientific community to help reporters and the general public to better identify and avoid fake news Social media is different from other media providing news (e.g., TV news, news websites, and mobile phone news apps) because users do not choose the source of articles that they see on social media. Instead, proprietary algorithms provide targeted information with little transparency. With other news media, users pick the source first, and do so with a familiarity of the nature of the source. With social media such as Facebook, articles from a wide variety of sources appear on users’ newsfeeds. News articles are intermixed with sponsored articles (i.e., paid advertisements) and posts from family and friends. All of these may be intentionally or unintentionally true or false, but some are explicitly designed to influence People. About 23% of social media users report that they have accidently or intentionally shared fake news. Over 60% say that fake news leaves them confused about current events.