Think before you share
by Sam Oswald
A recent MIT study found that fake news spreads six times faster than accurate news on Twitter, and falsehoods are 70% more likely to be retweeted. If you’ve been remotely aware of the current events of the last four years, you are aware of the obvious effects this rampant spread of false news on every social media platform is having on the surge in political radicalization and the now rampant tribalism raging across our country.
Here’s what’s going on: In the effort to maximize profits, algorithms were developed by social media platforms to find ways to keep users as engaged as possible. These algorithms quickly learned that fake, inflammatory and clickbait stories garnered way more attention than any real news story, and quickly pushed these stories to as many users as possible. As this process continued, these algorithms began pushing more and more radical content (be it left-wing or right-wing) and it didn’t take long for millions of Americans to start perceiving different realities.
In the 2020 Netflix documentary Social Dilemma, entrepreneur Justin Rosenstein gives a glimpse of what’s going on, “You look over at the other [political] side, and you start to think, ‘How can those people be so stupid? Look at all of this information that I’m constantly seeing. How are they not seeing that same information?’ And the answer is: they are not seeing that same information.”
The fact that our society has regressed to the point that we cannot accept basic facts and truths is sickeningly scary. Compromise and cooperation are hard enough, but when people can’t even agree on the basic facts or truth? It might as well be impossible. It is clear as day the effects the disinformation spread by social media is having on our country. From Q-Anon to Anti-Vaxxers to flat-earthers, social media has allowed for ideals and beliefs that were once considered fringe and dangerous to be popular and mainstream.
In my AP Government class we learned of Federalist 10, an essay written by James Madison in defense of the newly proposed Constitution. In this essay, Madison addressed the risk of factions and how destructive it is to nations when political groups become more interested in their own gains than their country’s. Madison believed that the way America would avoid this would be through its diversity. It would be this diversity of political thoughts and beliefs that would keep large majority factions from arising, and keep politicians from adopting radical legislature as they would need to appeal to as many voters as possible.
And, for more than 200 years, he was right. But with the advent of social media, its algorithms have propagated lies and deceit to brainwash their users and radicalize them in any way possible. This general acceptance of the altered truth has allowed political groups to take advantage of this extremism and use it to grow their agendas on ideas and policies that were once considered “fringe and dangerous” just a few years before.
How we as a nation can fix this problem is a hard question, and sadly there is no simple answer. With regards to Twitter, I do know there is some support for removing the “retweet” button all together. But this is one of Twitter’s main features, and though it may help alleviate some of the fake news on Twitter, it will not fully stop it.
My biggest piece of advice for how we as high school students can do our part in combatting this plague of misinformation is simple: double-check.
Fake news thrives off knee-jerk reactions. The easiest way it spreads is through people seeing an article, tweet/post it because it upsets them, and then others instantly reposting it without ever looking to see if what they read is even true or not. The best way to check to see if a story is true is if multiple, trusted sources are reporting a similar story. If so, you’ve found the truth.
