This may not surprise anyone who is familiar with the Internet, but social media is not exactly trustworthy when it comes to
communicating, you know, facts. That’s according to a new study by the American Press Institute’s Fact-Checking Project, which surveyed Twitter posts and found that incorrect or misleading
tweets outnumber attempts to correct them by a ratio of at least three to one.
The study, conducted by researchers at Columbia University, used algorithmic analysis to identify around 100,000 tweets pertaining to major current events subjects
including Ebola and Obamacare. In the case of Obamacare, in the first quarter of 2014 a number of news organizations reported that Obamacare would cause the loss of two million jobs, and many Twitter
uses shared linked to stories containing this erroneous claim; in the first three months of 2014 93% of these tweets simply repeated the claim as true, while just 7% attempted to correct the
error.
Regarding Ebola, there was widespread dissemination of
misinformation about Ebola’s arrival in the U.S. and subsequent spread to several healthcare workers, and Twitter users again played a part in perpetuating inaccurate stories, including, for
example, reporting about the possibility of airborne transmission. Meanwhile just 27% of tweets from the initial period of Ebola reporting attempted to correct the errors.
On the positive side, a separate API study also published this week found that presenting
people with accurate information can be effective in correcting misperceptions caused by erroneous reporting or simple ignorance, at least in some cases. For example, the API discovered that 67% of
Americans believed that China holds the majority of U.S. debt, when in fact it holds less than one tenth of the total. After being shown the correct information the number who still believed China
holds the majority of U.S. debt fell to 45.4% (of course that’s still around half, but at least someone was listening).
The findings about inaccurate news on social media are especially germane in light of the growing numbers of Americans
who get their news primarily from sources like Twitter and Facebook. According to the latest “State of the News Media” report from Pew, roughly half of American Web users get news about
politics and government from Facebook, the same proportion who get it through local news.
Last month, Facebook was reportedly in talks with news publishers including the New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic to host their content directly on
its own site. News stories would be hosted on Facebook and the social network would share the ad revenue with the publishers.