The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how social networks are exploited to spread misinformation, illustrating the process with historical cases from 2010 and 2016, and discusses research impact on societal issues.

Contribution

It outlines the misinformation spreading recipe used in social networks and compares political and financial motivations in different scenarios.

Findings

Identification of infiltration as key to misinformation spread

Successful application of the recipe in 2010 and 2016 events

Discussion on increasing research impact on societal issues

Abstract

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues.