The Rumor Cascade

For lots of people, the world is simply going the wrong way. They are “being denied” the power and lifestyle that they always assumed were their entitlement. Populism was born in those feelings. My fascination with populism and how it has found traction within established democracies in the last 100 years is scattered all over many of my recent blogs. This political reaction to displacement, the resulting shift cultural and economic power away from traditional incumbents to cultural relative newcomers and super-elites, has challenged governments, constitutional barriers and standards of moral propriety the world over. At the core of such populism: wild swings to the right, conspiracy theories, intentional disenfranchisement of the newbies and the willingness of radical incumbents to do “whatever it takes” to restore their economic and political power and purge those whom they perceive are their “displacers.”

The biggest driver fostering populism during this period has been the use of fake news. It starts out with demagoguery, strong voices lashing out at scapegoats, manufacturing the existence of credible but false “evil” forces in order to create a cohesive group reaction to “fight back.” Fake news builds on itself, until it overwhelms. The demagogues become the leaders. For successful populists, not only is fake news the new normal for their followers, but ultimately contradictory truth is universally condemned, often to the point that the genuine truth tellers are derided and, in extreme cases, purged. Loyalty, patriotism and, eventually, legality itself are increasingly defined by the fever and willingness of citizens to accept the new mythology as the only truth. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and vicious rule toe the line of this vision of populism right down into the smallest details, a clear if extreme example.

But the tools of populism equally reflect the times. Hitler probably could not have risen to power without radio. Today, it’s social media and digital communications, enhanced by segments of traditional media that have discovered the mass appeal of supporting the retro-populist movement. For those building their “truth” on “information” that resonates with their cause, assuming that anything that supports their vision of the world must be “true,” they are particularly vulnerable to the dissemination of fake news. The more they build that vision on fake news, the more their world is predicated on a complex nexus of falsehoods, the more they are inclined to “dig in” (“double down”) and defend their mythology with a passion that suggests how important that “structure of falsehoods” is sacred to their view of the world. Sprinkle in religion and the demand of religious leaders invoking “God,” and the results simply intensify.

This may explain the “why” such beliefs are so passionately held, and why, for example, intelligent people can deny man-induced climate change despite a near unanimous scientific consensus and popular opinion from virtually the entire rest of the world to the contrary. Contradictory factual information, to passionate mythologists who believe their very survival is conditioned on the “truth” of their mythology, is itself simply dismissed as biased fake news disseminated by their enemies. But beyond the “why” is the “how.”

A recent study from MIT explains how fake news explodes in a modern era. Russian media manipulators certainly inculcated a litany of carefully-crafted social media posts and email blasts into the fake-news-mythology-craving segment of the population, using commonly-available online sentiment-tracking to tailor messages for those most susceptible to a particular prejudice, bias or mythology. The notion that “I saw this in writing” justification for believing a falsehood seems to be at the core of why the Russian effort found traction, but this automated “bot” effort is not what created that tsunami of disinformation that spread so virulently into the right-wing consciousness. It is the propensity of those finding those false facts, attaching their names to the disinformation, and retransmitting that information to their connected network that defines the success of such populist media communications.

The March 16^th Los Angeles Times explains: A new scientific analysis offers proof of something that social media acolytes have known for years: Twitter is an excellent platform for spreading actual news… Unfortunately, the analysis shows, it’s even better at spreading fake news.

Compared with tweets about claims that were verifiably true, tweets about claims that were undeniably false were 70% more likely to be retweeted in the Twitterverse. And false claims about politics spread further than any other category of news in the analysis.

A team of data scientists and social media experts from MIT came to these conclusions after examining the spread of thousands of tweets shared by millions of people over 12 years. The findings were reported last week in the journal Science.

‘Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,’ wrote Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy of the MIT Media Lab and Sinan Aral of MIT’s Sloan School of Management… ‘It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people,’ the trio added… The researchers considered ‘news’ to be ‘any asserted claim made on Twitter’ expressed in words, a photo or a link to a full article.

Thanks to politicians, the term ‘fake news’ now means information that does not support one’s point of view. The researchers made a point of avoiding this phrase. Instead, they categorized news as either ‘true’ or ‘false.’ A tweet labeled ‘false’ doesn’t imply that the writer is trying to pull a fast one. It only means that the claim is inaccurate… When any type of news claim spreads on Twitter, it becomes a ‘rumor.’

The pattern by which a tweet spreads is a ‘rumor cascade.’ If a tweet is retweeted 10 times in an unbroken chain, it is a cascade with a size of 10. If two people tweet the same news and each of those tweets is retweeted five times in an unbroken chain, we have two rumor cascades, each of size five..

Vosoughi, Roy and Aral used this framework to map the spread of information on Twitter since its creation in 2006 through last year… They mapped out every rumor cascade rooted by a claim that had been fact-checked by snopes.com, politifact.com , factcheck.org , truthorfiction.com , hoax-slayer.com or urbanlegends.about.com. They wound up with roughly 126,000 rumor cascades…

Rumor cascades based on true news rarely spread to more than 1,000 people. But at least 1% of rumor cascades based on false news did this routinely… In the top 0.01% of both true and false rumor cascades, the false ones ‘diffused eight hops deeper into the Twittersphere than the truth.’

False news was more likely to be ‘viral.’ So not only were the retweet chains longer, but they were more likely to branch off into new chains… Rumor cascades about politics outnumbered those of all other topics, including urban legends, business, terrorism, science, entertainment and natural disasters. The news that ultimately spread the most concerned politics, urban legends and science.

False news about politics spread to 20,000 people almost three times more quickly than any other kind of false news reached 10,000 people… Compared with people who spread true news, users who spread false news were newer to Twitter, had fewer followers, followed fewer people and were less active with the platform.

The researchers believe false news has more novelty, making it more surprising and more valuable — and more likely to be retweeted… They figured this out by studying a random selection of about 25,000 tweets seen by 5,000 people and comparing their content with the other tweets those people would have seen in the previous 60 days. They also examined the emotional content of replies to these tweets and found that false tweets prompted greater feelings of surprise and disgust. (True tweets generated replies expressing sadness and trust.)… “‘False news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it,’ the trio wrote.

Add this to the propensity of first impressions to retain sticky credibility, even if the recipient is convinced later that the information was false, and you can fully appreciate how populism grows merely by raising that mythology about all else. To the extent that mainstream media, like Fox News and conservative radio, join the fray, they are containing their most valuable advertising and subscriber base by supporting what their viewers/listener want to hear… and what they do not want to hear.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the ability of the purveyors of false mythologies to create such societal “truth” is and has been the biggest threat to the viability of democracy – where freedom to speak is at the core of the underlying value chain – since that political philosophy was first implemented.