Can’t separate real news from fake news on Facebook? Blame your inherent biases

Confirmation bias means we believe stories to be true if they relate to what we know, even when flagged as fake 
In the run up to the election, fake news is all the rage, even when it comes to costumes
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
Amelia Heathman6 November 2019

Parliament has been dissolved and the 2019 General Election has officially started. But as the UK’s democratic process gets underway, there are concerns over the impact that fake news and deep fakes (AI-doctored videos) on social media could have on the election results.

Already, the Conservative Party has been accused of editing a video of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer so it looks like he was unable to answer a question on ITV’s Good Morning Britain.

It turns out it’s not that easy to separate fact from fiction when it comes to news on social media, particularly Facebook. A new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas Austin, has analysed people’s perception of political headlines on the platform and it came to the conclusion that our inherent biases can muddle our judgement when it comes to news on social media.

During the study, 80 undergraduate students who were regarded as “social media proficient” were asked 10 questions about their political beliefs. Then, each participant was fitted with an EEG headset to track their brain activity. Following the fitting, the students were asked to read 50 political news headlines presented as they would appear on Facebook and assess their credibility, ranking the headlines based on believability, credibility and truthfulness.

Of the 50 headlines, 10 were clearly true, such as “Trump signs new executive order on immigration”, which acted as controls. The remaining 40 news stories were made up of 20 true and 20 false headlines. As well, the researchers randomly assigned fake news flags to stories, to mimic Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.

Throughout the exercise, the students only assessed 44 per cent of the headlines correctly and overwhelming selected headlines that aligned with their political beliefs as true, regardless of if it had a fake news flag. Using the EEG headsets, it appeared that the participants spent more time checking the stories they believed were true but had a fake news flag, and there was significantly more brain activity in the frontal cortices – the brain area associated with arousal, memory access and consciousness – when reading these headlines.

The authors of the study point to how the results demonstrate confirmation bias on social media. As the participants gravitated towards and processed information that was consistent with their already-specified political beliefs, they were ignoring information that was inconsistent with that notion – such as the fake news flag on stories they believed to be true.

Speaking about the results, lead author Patricia Moravec, assistant professor of information, risk and operations management, said: "We all believe that we are better than the average person at detecting fake news, but that's simply not possible. The environment of social media and our own biases make us all much worse than we think.

"The fact that social media perpetuates and feeds this bias complicates people's ability to make evidence-based decisions. But if the facts that you do have are polluted by fake news that you truly believe, then the decisions you make are going to be much worse,” she added.

Facebook has stepped up its efforts to tackle fake news online. This year it announced its fact-checking programme with the charity Full Fact would be coming to the UK. Recently, the company says it has taken down over 50 networks that were attempting to engage in “inauthentic behaviour” on the platform.

But if there’s one nugget of advice we can take into the upcoming general election, it’s don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

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