Tiny number of 'supersharers' spread the majority of fake news

&quot;How do we stop people from sharing (what I deem to be) fake news?&quot; is the wrong question. The right question is &quot;How do we give people the tools to identify fake news?&quot; If you give people the tools and they still spread what you deem to be fake news, then you&#x27;ve done what you can. Tough cookies for you.<p>Too many people get very angry that people share things they disagree with, and then start talking about clamping down on communication. No, sorry, but your ideas lost. People are allowed to think and share things that make you angry. If your views aren&#x27;t mainstream, there&#x27;s a reason for that. &quot;Fake news&quot; is only a tiny part of the equation. If you pick up that censorship weapon, that we all implicitly agree to not use, you will not be the last to wield it.

Way back ~1990, when internet email was first being rolled out to non-technical employees at fairly-tech-savvy orgs, I noticed that there were a very small minority of people - yes, generally non-technical older women - who suffered from &quot;Recreational Sharing Disorder&quot;. It didn&#x27;t matter if the stuff was blond jokes, or &quot;everyone has to pray for Katie, who has cancer&quot;, or &quot;forward this 1,000 times and there will be world peace&quot;, or what. Obviously they had neither filters for credibility, nor good filters for respecting other peoples&#x27; time budgets and expressed interests. And as the number of connected users expanded, a tiny % of RSD cases could quickly generate enough email traffic to badly impact a site&#x27;s email service. (Which was usually dial-up modem or fractional T-1.)<p>Mathematically, it was very interesting. And with an occasional reminder from management, they could pretty-well control their RSD at work.<p>These days, there&#x27;s a toxic hot mess of politics and emotions laid over the whole situation. But it might be useful to recall that the underlying problem is mostly a network with a very large N, and the bell-curve distributions of certain human behaviors.

It&#x27;s a well-known fact that a tiny focused group can have a major impact on the society; that&#x27;s how many initially fringe progressive ideas were implemented, like LGBT rights. The problem of fake news is that some of them turn out to be true, discrediting whoever opposed them, casting doubt on the &quot;arbiters of truth&quot;, giving further credibility to supersharers (&quot;what if this person is right when we know official media lied to us in this and that case?&quot;). Now we have even well-respected people that spent their whole life in the power circles like Jeffrey Sachs casting doubt on many official narratives. This further weakens the &quot;truth&quot; signal and increases confusion. I suspect AI is going to make everything worse fairly soon as well.

Personally I would prefer social media without the ability to &quot;retweet&quot; at all. I want actual original updates from the people I follow, not news (fake or otherwise) or chain letters.

Way back, like waaaaay back, you can imagine strangers meet out in the wilderness, each wary of the other. To determine threats or potential friends they would need to establish trust. Where you are from, who you know, do we know the same people, do you lie, etc. &quot;Ah, you know the Baker and are traveling through here to trade with them.&quot;<p>Early webs of trust were on personal knowledge of others. I think a similar web of trust needs to reemerge. Vouching and relationships and when the vouchee messes up it affects the voucher. Imagine if your relationship graph could crumble when you let someone into the circle of trust who ends up a wolf.<p>If you could cut out whole circles of trust when they are compromised, we could maybe get more authentic web back. See shit ads or blog spam, penalize the circle that houses it by no longer seeing its content.<p>Many smaller circles join to other circles, where irl know people in the first circle. Like a new take on web rings.<p>If your only portal to the internet was through your rings and related rings, we may get echo chambers but we may also gain the ability to remove bad actors from our immediate rings. Fake news propaganda? Penalized the ring and all members until that wolf is removed.<p>#MorningThoughts.

The term &quot;fake news&quot; is so broad and fraught with ideological positioning, linguistic overreach, and self-righteous, naïve realism that it really ought to be banned. It does not do what it seemingly intends to do, which is to make people more critical of what they read and share; it does the opposite, just labeling sources as bad or good, which is as close to propaganda as it gets.<p>A more nuanced classification than the &quot;fake news&#x2F;good news&quot; binary is sorely needed.

Anecdotally, I’ve paid to promote a number of tweets over the last few years, and have consistently found that there is a certain percentage of users that are apparently retweeting absolutely everything in their feed. My content is niche, and usually has a very small audience, and so these “blind retweeters” stick out like a sore thumb when I look into who does anything with my tweet.<p>The behavior I’ve observed is consistent with the article, in that the timings of their flood of retweets could very well indicate a real human pressing the buttons, and I suspect they are. And, it does not surprise me that when looking at the long tail of the most absurd fake news that has a small audience on an individual tweet level, that one would find the majority of the retweets for such obvious fakeness is coming from such blind retweeters.<p>The effect overall is that whatever bubble such users are in gets amplified a bit, absurdity and all, though I’m skeptical they play any role at all in what becomes truly popular.<p>The real problem is far more nuanced with the less obvious fake news that even those not tapping blindly are taken in by, the less obvious fake news that gets a large audience because a lot of people find it believable, hoaxes that persist in the collective unconscious long after their time in the spotlight has faded, regardless of any debunking or fact checking that played a role in its popularity dying out.<p>I think the effect of these super spreaders repeating complete nonsense is minuscule compared to the effect of organically popular almost reasonable nonsense that truly goes mainstream.

We live in a reductionist world. that&#x27;s not going to change. The other commenter is right, the only way out is better tooling.<p>I can&#x27;t tell the fake people from the real ones anymore, much less accurately judge information quality. That&#x27;s the cesspool that ad-driven internet created and here we are, no exit in sight.<p>I&#x27;ve worked with many organizations in crisis and on the way out. There comes a time that everybody knows they&#x27;re in the endgame, but they march on anyway. People&#x27;s actions become a bit like those in a Potemkin Village. The end days of the Soviet Union was like that.<p>To me, the tools we&#x27;re going to need to go forward have frack-all to do with coding. Small trust groups of real people, incremental sharing, overlapping interests and groups, devices that do one and only one things at a time (so that you and your social group can help you monitor your usage to optimize). We know these things work for humans. We&#x27;ve been doing them thousands of years.<p>Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but these are the tools we need to move forward as a species. Tech can certainly help, but it can never even come close to replacing the shared social&#x2F;evolutionary experience we all have baked in.<p>I&#x27;m positive long-term about tech and progress, but just like any other massive change in tooling, we need to cut out the bullshit and re-adapt social norms. We&#x27;ve done this kind of thing many times before and hopefully we&#x27;ll continue to do so.

<i>&quot;It also points to a possible solution, he says: “Simple limits on retweets would constrain the spread of this information while having little effect on the vast majority of users.”</i><p>This is a good solution. I remember a while ago, I believe it was in India, WhatsApp limited the number of users you could share something with as a response to the platform being used for riling up ethnic violence. Putting an inhibitor on this cascading virality has to improve the sanity in any communication network.<p>Individual accounts broadcasting at the rate of major TV news stations with no scrutiny isn&#x27;t a combination that was ever going to produce something approaching the truth. The entire premise of how groups produce truth is through a representative wisdom-of-the-crowds effect. 0.1% of highly correlated users swinging every discussion is extremely pathological.<p>Most glaring problem is of course that limiting your most viral users is complete anathema to the business incentives of any for-profit social media platform, so in particular I don&#x27;t see it happening on Twitter.

Theres no way to get rid of &quot;fake news&quot;.<p>And nor would you want to as many times what people mean by fake news is dissenting news.<p>The key is to educate people to think for themselves and question everything.

Wasn&#x27;t this the takeaway from the book &quot;The Tipping Point&quot;. It talks about small number of people with lots of connections are the source of making things popular &#x2F; viral. This is exactly that.

*Tiny number of &#x27;supersharers&#x27; spread the majority of news.<p>I bet that&#x27;s what a further study will conclude.

Same goes for real news, and everything else. Power law distribution.

Services like Twitter which serve a very very large number of people have a responsibility to maintain a civil, clean platform.<p>If the trouble makers are a small minority, it should be easy to cut them off then.<p>And for those who will cry &quot;freedom of speech&quot;, liberty does not mean everyone gets to do whatever they want. Everyone&#x27;s freedoms are bounded by the freedoms of others

I want to highlight another aspect to this that doesn&#x27;t seem to be mentioned: reddit.<p>We all know about adding &quot;reddit&quot; or &quot;site:reddit.com&quot; as a search term. So does Google. We saw in the recent leaks how Google is increasingly value reddit as a source. Why do we do this? Because it&#x27;s one of the few remaining places that isn&#x27;t completely astroturfed.<p>But this is a temporary situation. You can see this on any controversial topic. It is incredibly easyto hijack a subreddit or simply change what bubbles by brigading posts. This can be with real people (usually coordinated via a Discord) or with bots. This is not simply a bot detection problem. It might be viewable as a voting ring problem but I have my doubts.<p>Depending on the size of the subreddit this may only take dozens of people acting in concert. Even larger subreddits may only take a few hundred. But such a group can completely change what posts make it to the top and also what comments on each post make it to the top.<p>My point here is taht many on HN and elsewhere like to bemoan &quot;fake news&quot; on social media, which is a real problem to be sure. But at the same time they will extoll the virtues of reddit. The only difference is they&#x27;re either unaware of reddit manipulation or it hasn&#x27;t happened to their favorite subreddits <i>yet</i>.

Interesting data but technically an orphan statistic. Who is it that&#x27;s spreading the real news? The same group of people could be responsible for 80% of all news spreading and we wouldn&#x27;t know from this study.

&#x27;“I do not see a lot of benefit in allowing people to send unrestricted amounts of retweets in a day,” Grinberg says.&#x27;<p>I do not see a lot of benefit in allowing Grinberg to speak on policy matters.

Why is the author siting studies about Twitter from 2016 to 2019 but referring to “X users” when Musk bought the company in 2022?

There really should be a way to target and remove purposefully malicious communication from the open social platforms.

We know social media is used to manipulate people. If you want unbiased news, look at AP, not Meta or Twitter.

What is &#x27;fake news&#x27; for one person is truth to another.<p>What it boils down to is who decides what is the truth and whether they have the right to censor everything and everybody else.<p>In the 90&#x27;s, the internet came as a salvation for free speech because now everybody got to have their voice heard. I definitely don&#x27;t like this trend of censorship, it&#x27;s not what our western democracy is built upon.

This genre of research is disturbing to me. Researchers found accounts spreading ideas they didn’t like, tracked down their real world identities, and then recommended ways of silencing them. Please consider the implications of this activity, especially (inevitably) when it’s used to target communities we’re a part of.

Facebook figured this out too a long time ago when building news tab.<p>But unfortunately they also saw that these people were 90% aligned with the same political party and Joel Kaplan helped Zuck understand that actioning it would mean declaring war on the party.<p>So Zuck tucked his tail.<p>Proving once again that most of our problems today are not tech problems and don’t have tech solutions but are societal in nature.<p>We know what to do on climate change, we just don’t like the tradeoff. Or more precisely our governmental systems can not overcome the resistance because we forgot to incentivize long term survival.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;25&#x2F;facebook-fatal-flaw-technologists-lobbyists-516927" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;25&#x2F;facebook-fatal-flaw...</a><p>We know what to do about misinformation.<p>We know what to do about micro plastics pollution<p>We know what to do about antibiotic resistance<p>We know what to do about gun violence.<p>So we hold out for magical technology fixes.<p>The special trick in the US is that everything can be made a partisan problem, which instantly means paralyzing government intervention.

Ignorance is strength - that guy was onto something.

I don&#x27;t even need to open the linked article to know that when they say &quot;fake news&quot; they actually mean &quot;facts that go against the current narrative&quot;.

During the pandemic it came down to just a few singular accounts, apparently.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;996570855&#x2F;disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;996570855&#x2F;disinformation-doze...</a>

EDIT: changed my mind

See also: &quot;Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9rvroo&#x2F;most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;9rvroo&#x2F;most...</a>

I bet this is also how most religions started.

One of the most ridiculous behaviours of so-called &quot;Big Tech&quot; and its employees is to try to blame end users for problems.<p>That certain individuals had a noticeable propensity for forwarding chain letters and other garbage on the early internet, from which they received _no economic benefit_, may have informed the tactics of today&#x27;s &quot;Big Tech&quot; intermediaries but what these so-called &quot;tech&quot; companies do today is to _encourage_ this behaviour for their _own_ economic benefit. Truthfully, it goes beyond merely &quot;promoting&quot; sharing. The www user visiting a so-called &quot;tech&quot; company website does not _make a choice_ to share, like someone sharing e-mail chain letters on the early internet, the www user using a so-called &quot;tech&quot; company website _has no choice_.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2011&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-problem-with-facebooks-new-frictionless-sharing&#x2F;245578&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2011&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-p...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adage.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;digitalnext&#x2F;facebook-s-frictionless-sharing-create-ads-facebook&#x2F;232419" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adage.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;digitalnext&#x2F;facebook-s-frictionles...</a><p>It is in the economic interests of the so-called &quot;tech&quot; company intermediary to _promote_ what is referred to as &quot;viral&quot; content. The quality of the content is irrelevant. If it is &quot;viral&quot;, shared and viewed by large audiences, then it has potential to generate revenue for the so-called &quot;tech&quot; company. It has sufficient audience size and therefore it has value to advertisers.<p>Thus, for example, one can visit the YouTube website to search for videos titles and descriptions that contain a certain keyword. As a result of so-called &quot;tech&quot; company tactics, the results of the search may contain videos whose titles and descriptions do not contain the keyword and in fact have no relevance at all to what is being searched for. The sharing of this content is not optional. It is being forced, without any voluntary user input, by so-called &quot;tech&quot; companies hoping to profit from advertising services.<p>In sum, the so-called &quot;tech&quot; companies want end users of the www to be looking at the _same_ content. These intermediaries manipulate people who use their websites so that users look at the _same_ pages. There could be millions of people all wanting to view different pages but if each page has an audience of one this is not useful for selling advertising services, hence the so-called &quot;tech&quot; company will manipulate users so that they look at the _same_ pages. It is not doing this for the benefit of the people using the www, or even for the benefit of the &quot;content creators&quot;, it is doing this for its _own_ economic benefit.

Did you see the article claiming Hunter Biden&#x27;s laptop wasn&#x27;t really Hunter Biden&#x27;s laptop, but rather had &quot;all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation&quot;? If stories like this, run by fake news sites such as NPR or NYT, popped up in your social media feed about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, they probably came from a tiny group of people with a massive impact.

Why does this article only show right-wing news as if the left is always truthful?

Fake news is hard to classify (unless you limit to obvious fakes with no reasonable room to dispute), and hard to sample fairly. This study is also limited to a single event.<p>What is misinformation can be debatable too, and it can affect the results. For example, a study by Kings College London on Covid misinformation in the UK during lockdown looked at mostly very clear cut things (e.g. its caused by 5G etc) but also included the lab leak theory as misinformation. That shifted the results because they lab leak theory appealed to a different group of people (older, right wing) to the others (younger, left wing).<p>I am pretty sure you would get different results in other countries, but my point is what you include changes the results.<p>My personal experience of political misinformation on social media (mostly FB) is that it is subtle (e.g. quotes out of context to change their meaning, or with misleading commentary), sometimes originates from mainstream media, and comes mostly from the &quot;left&quot;. However, that is because my friends, at least those who are inclined to discuss politics on social media, are mostly affluent professional British people who vote Labour (the historically left wing party). A hopelessly biased sample.

My aunt used to occasionally forward emails to me that were obviously part of viral messaging attempts. They would often be religious in nature, but they&#x27;d also sometimes have messages of racial hatred or political topics. They would say things like &quot;If you resend this email 100 times then Bill Gates will pay you a penny per email when you have sent 1,000,000 emails! This is the gospel truth!&quot;. There would be a long list of other forwarded emails after that with the email addresses of all the other women who had forwarded that and other emails, so if you looked through that history there would be a variety of topics. &quot;Don&#x27;t break this chain or you will go to hell!&quot; These retweet networks may be a continuation of a similar thing, playing on peoples religiousness to get them to spread false messages (mixed in with true messages). Here&#x27;s an example of one of them, I&#x27;ve tried to preserve the unusual spacing:<p>{start of message}<p>Read all of this one, it is interesting!!<p><pre><code> Near the bottom--the part highlighted in green--will give you GOOSEBUMPS!!! </code></pre> You don&#x27;t want to miss this!<p>VERY INTERESTING-<p>1. The Garden of Eden was in Iraq<p>2. Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the cradle of civilization!<p>3. Noah built the ark in Iraq<p>4. The Tower of Babel was in Iraq<p>5. Abraham was from Ur, which is in Southern Iraq<p>6. Isaac&#x27;s wife Rebekah is from Nahor , which is in Iraq<p>7. Jacob met Rachel in Iraq<p>8. Jonah preached in Nineveh - which is in Iraq<p>9.. Assyria, which is in Iraq, conquered the ten tribes of Israel<p>10. Amos cried out in Iraq<p>11. Babylon, which is in Iraq, destroyed Jerusalem<p>12. Daniel was in the lion&#x27;s den in Iraq<p>13. The three Hebrew children were in the fire in Iraq (Jesus had been in Iraq also as the fourth person in the Fiery Furnace!)<p>14. Belshazzar, the King of Babylon saw the &#x27;writing on the wall&#x27; in Iraq<p>15. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, carried the Jews captive into Iraq<p>16... Ezekiel preached in Iraq<p>17... The wise men were from Iraq<p>18. Peter preached in Iraq<p>19. The &#x27;Empire of Man&#x27; described in Revelation is called Babylon --which was a city in Iraq<p>And you have probably seen this one: Israel is the nation most often mentioned in the Bible.<p>But do you know which nation is second?<p>It is Iraq !<p>However, that is not the name that is used in the Bible..<p>The names used in the Bible are Babylon , Land of Shinar , and Mesopotamia ... The word Mesopotamia means between the two rivers, more exactly between the Tigris And Euphrates Rivers ..<p>The name Iraq means country with deep roots.<p>Indeed Iraq is a country with deep roots and is a very significant country in the Bible.<p>No other nation, except Israel , has more history and prophecy associated<p>With it than Iraq<p>And also, This is something to think about:<p>Since America is<p>Typically represented by an eagle.<p>Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages ....<p>The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible)<p>Koran ( 9:11 ) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle.. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah;<p>And there was peace.<p>(Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?!<p>I BETTER NOT HEAR OF ANYONE BREAKING THIS ONE OR SEE IT DELETED.<p>This is a ribbon for soldiers fighting in Iraq ..<p>Pass it on to everyone and pray.<p>Something good will happen to you tonight at 11:11 PM<p>This is not a joke.<p>Someone will either call you or will talk to you online and say that they love you.<p>Do not break this chain..<p>Send this to 13 people in<p>The next 15 minutes.<p>Go<p>{End of message}<p>There were a variety of common topics, religion, support for soldiers, funny stories about old people, pet stories, and then the odd political or social message.

Federal Government (e.g. CIA) is a key spreader of misinformation.

E.g. msnbc, New York Times, cnn

Looks like the groundwork is being laid to dispute the results of the upcoming US presidential election if the wrong person gets elected.

An alternative solution is to abolish universal suffrage. Re-introduce wealth requirement since people who are able to accumulate wealth tend to see the world as it is. Then we don&#x27;t have to worry about the vagaries of the poor &amp; gullible anymore.