Service Alert
Service Alert
The Internet and social media have several features that enable the rapid and far-reaching spread of misinformation:
Information created or shared by one person anywhere in the world can potentially be seen by anyone else with an Internet connection.
This information can be distributed immediately to potentially billions of people with a series of clicks.
Social media platforms are intentionally designed to hook users (Andersson, 2018).
Social media fosters relationships that feel genuinely close for users, leading to a sense of trust comparable to that of long-term intimate real-world relationships (Hoffner & Bond, 2022; Horton & Wohl, 1956). This can make the content on social media extremely influential for users (Hoffner & Bond, 2022).
While anonymity can make it easier for users to access and share helpful information while maintaining their privacy, this anonymity can also help users behave negatively without consequences (Dawson, 2018).
Bots are automated social media accounts. These accounts may be programmed for various actions, from the benign (such as tweeting the time every hour) to the malicious (disseminating malware or unsolicited content). They can contribute to the spread of misinformation by impersonating actual human users and creating or sharing false or inflammatory content (Himelein-Wachowiak et al., 2021).
However, human users have a greater impact on the spread of misinformation than bots (Vosoughi et al., 2018).
Social media users post material for various reasons, from wanting to share pictures of their vacation with family and friends to inform other users about a cause they care about. However, social media users have additional incentives for posting content including:
Trolling is intentionally seeking to draw others into pointless and/or uncivil discussions. This arises from people who tend to demonstrate antisocial traits and experience pleasure at seeing members of an “out-group” suffer (Brubaker et al., 2021). In addition to general negative content, trolls may also spread misinformation.
In addition to the simple desire for popularity or prestige, social media users are motivated to increase their influence for various reasons, including:
Social media users with large followings can leverage their audience to sell their own merchandise, courses, or other products, without any guarantee that the information they provide is accurate (Korn, 2022).
Social media users with large audiences can earn money for promoting products from other companies on their platforms. While many of these posts are marked as "sponsored" by the platforms, the platforms themselves are very likely to approve advertisements that contain even “blatantly” false information (Korn, 2022).
One unique feature of social media is that platforms will begin directly paying content creators for the content posted to their platforms once those users accumulate enough followers or time spent viewing their posts (Meier, 2022).
The mission of any business is to make money, and social media companies turn a profit in 2 main ways that reinforce each other:
These activities taken together are an example of a phenomenon known as "surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff et al. 257).
Surveillance capitalism is the collection of massive amounts of personal data and commodifying it for profit (Zuboff et al. 257).
Social media companies design their platforms to be as addictive as possible so that users will see more ads and provide more data (Andersson, 2018).
The companies do 2 things with the data they collect from users:
The more time users spend on these platforms, the more ads they view, and the more data they provide, which platforms can continue to analyze to tailor advertisements and content. It becomes a reinforcing feedback loop intentionally designed to demand users' attention.