While facilitating peoples’ exchange of knowledge, thoughts and ideas, social media provide a perfect hotbed for the speculation of rumors. Political news that easily arouses peoples’ attention and creates dissatisfaction or doubt towards the government, social news that’s closely related to daily lives and thus create a strong vicarious empathy among the crowd, and some health-related topics that focuses on ordinary peoples’ way of health preserving, among all of which exist a tremendous amount of rumors. By making use of various properties of human being, creators of these rumors are turning social network into a place where words are less trustworthy. In this blog I try trivially using some ideas mentioned in the class that are probably related to this situation, so as to investigate the underlying reasons.
Why rumors exist?
1. Will to Misuse Emotions
The government controls every means of media by means of kinds of censorship, while a large group of people are fond of attacking the loopholes. [1] The more the government wants to “hide” from the audience, the more likely these people will fight back. However this positive will of claiming freedom is misused by some anti-social, anti-government entities who don’t want peace but chaos for the society. Falsely coined accuses against government officers and police, fake appeals for morality through malicious setting of stories, and other rich, emotional storytelling can easily arouse people’s pity and attention. Being true or not is no longer the key focus of the public.
2. Misinterpretations
Certain rumors are just due to the contorting nature of word passing. Second handed information, segments of the original messages and reinterpretations are all key factors to misinterpretations. While the writers might not be intentionally malicious, different parties could make use of the distorted words and spread them randomly.
3. Low cost
The cost of coining a piece rumor is close to zero, and the avalanche effect that will be brought along far exceeds the cost.
Why
rumors spread?
1. Lack of Responsibility
Social network is somehow similar to real life social groups, except that it relieves people from some compulsory duties when a person becomes an anonymous entity. Deindividuation appears when entities take no responsibilities during passing along fake news, when they might act more hostile or less careful compared with their normal status.
2. Humans’ “Better Safe Than Sorry” Nature
Some people can spread news even though they are just partially convinced, driven by the “better safe than sorry” thinking. Examples can be donation-raising, volunteer help for countryside children, or simply a union of power to fight against some certain party.
3. Power of Models
Certain figures serve as role models among the whole society, so if that group of people spread news without careful investigation, a large group of people can join alongside, by mistake.
4. Lower cognitive level
The fast pace of society and the overwhelming amount of information stops people from thinking deeply and thoroughly, with their limited time. Less time leads to a lower level of cognitive thinking. Without processing the information, people are prone to believing instead of doubting.
5. Herd Behavior
People’s nature of following crowds and believing in common beliefs eases the spread of rumors. The more a piece of news is re-twitted, the larger the increase rate is in terms of its propagation in time and space, until it reaches a threshold. [2]
6. High cost to clarify facts
While it takes almost nothing to create a rumor, it takes time and labor to clarify the truth. Compared with appalling rumors, truths always seem more tedious, which will stop people from spreading them and buying them. Human’s tendency to stay in the same place also stops them from believing an absolute opposite point of view.
Conclustion: There are way too many reasons behind this issue, so i can just pinpoint a tiny portion of them, which already seems a bit messy and boring=((((. If it's possible, could you also randomly drop some bomb? =) And welcome to leave any comment you like.
References:
[1] H. Gao, Rumor, Lies, and Weibo: How Social Media is Changing the Nature of Truth in China, The Atlantic [Online]. Available:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/rumor-lies-and-weibo-how-social-media-is-changing-the-nature-of-truth-in-china/255916/
[2] B. Doerr, M. Fouz, T. Friedrich, Why Rumors Spread Fast in Social Network, Communications of the ACM, 2012 Available:
http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~tfried/paper/2012CACM.pdf
