The article ’Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally” by Giovanni L. Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer was published on June 20, 2018. The authors argue types of biases. “Our research has identified three types of bias that make the social media ecosystem vulnerable to both intentional and accidental misinformation”. Social media are essential sources of information and news all over the world. Professors from Indian University identify three fundamental biases affecting how people consume information on social media like Facebook and Twitter. And we suppose to know that lot of information is fake to create propaganda, spam, and fraud.
Biases in the brain. The brain can process a lot of information but too much of them can cost misunderstanding and mental chaos. If people try to share the story they saw on social media with others, too much information causes them to miss important facts and transforming messages. Professors created a game called Fakey to help learn to recognize signals of source credibility.
Bias in society. Facebook and Twitter can give you some political or social preferences based on that what your friends like. This is a bias that comes from society. Professors built the Hoaxy system which tracks and visualizes the spread of content from different sources.
Bias in the machine. Based on that what people read or research online builds algorithms, and they are inundated with similar messages or ads. This can end up reinforcing the cognitive and social biases of users and make them more vulnerable to manipulation by media, and fake news.
I think that this is so dangerous that social media has become a big part of people’s lives. We use social media like Facebook or Twitter to get news and learn new things. We believe what we see or read and do not check the sources. Often biases are coded into social media. Social media narrows people’s perspectives and it ends up influencing how we make other decisions regarding our own beliefs.
I like the Fakey game. I clicked the button “Fact-Check” to make sure that info comes from a responsible source which lowers my score.
One thought on “Misinformation and biases involved in social media”
Hello Anna! I agree with you, it is very dangerous to trust what we read on social networks and share it without first trying to see how accurate the information is, if the source is reliable. Many times, we share news because we see people close to us have done it, but this may not be entirely true or it may be misrepresented, it is better to do our own research before sharing and stop false news. If each person used social media responsibly misinformation and false, news would not cause so much division in social group.