{"id":427114,"date":"2024-12-03T10:23:53","date_gmt":"2024-12-03T10:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=427114"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T14:00:00","slug":"Research-reveals-how-outrage-helps-misinformation-spread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/Research-reveals-how-outrage-helps-misinformation-spread\/","title":{"rendered":"Research reveals how outrage helps misinformation spread"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(Photo by freestocks.org via Pexels)<\/p>\n

By Stephen Beech via SWNS<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Moral “outrage” helps misinformation spread<\/a> through social media<\/a>, suggests new research.<\/p>\n

Scientists say Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a> posts containing false information presented as facts evoke more reaction than posts with trustworthy information.<\/p>\n

And, in turn, that outrage facilitates the spread of misinformation<\/a>, according to the American study.<\/p>\n

The research team also found that people are more likely to share outrage-evoking misinformation<\/a> without reading it first.<\/p>\n

The findings, published in the journal Science<\/a>, suggest that attempts to stop the online spread of misinformation<\/a> by encouraging people to check its accuracy before sharing may not be successful.<\/p>\n

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(Photo by Thought Catalog via Pexels)<\/p>\n

-By Talker
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Study first author Killian McLoughlin and his colleagues conducted eight studies using U.S. data from Facebook and Twitter over multiple time periods, along with two behavioral experiments involving 1,475 participants.<\/p>\n

The research team analyzed more than one million Facebook links and over 44,500 Twitter posts.<\/p>\n

For the study, “outrage” was defined as the mix of anger and disgust triggered by perceived moral transgressions.<\/p>\n

McLoughlin said: “We tested a hypothesis that misinformation exploits<\/a> outrage to spread online, examining generalisability across multiple platforms, time periods, and classifications of misinformation.<\/p>\n

“Outrage is highly engaging and need not be accurate to achieve its communicative goals, making it an attractive signal to embed in misinformation<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

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(Photo by Lisa Fotios via Pexels)<\/p>\n

-By Talker
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The researchers found that outrage-evoking posts facilitated \u201cthe spread of misinformation at least as strongly as trustworthy news.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLoughlin, a psychology and social policy PhD student at Princeton University<\/a> in New Jersey, said: “People may share outrageous misinformation<\/a> without checking its accuracy because sharing is a way to signal their moral position or membership in certain groups.”<\/p>\n

He believes the way that social media platforms rank content to show to users probably also plays a part in the spread of misinformation.<\/p>\n

McLoughlin said: \u201cSince outrage is associated with increased engagement online, outrage-evoking misinformation may be likely to spread farther in part because of the algorithmic amplification of engaging content.”<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThis is important because algorithms may up-rank news articles associated with outrage, even if a user intended to express outrage toward the article for containing misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Study first author Killian McLoughlin and his colleagues conducted eight studies using U.S. data from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23812],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}