Trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media – Group 3

It is believed that the misinformation on social media is damaging societies and democratic
institutions. Studies show that many US adults were exposed to false stories before the 2016
elections and post elections surveys suggested that people believed the fake stories . In
response the , Facebook and other social media companies have made a range of algorithmic
and policy changes to limit the spread of fake news . The research question of the paper is to
quantify the trends of diffusion of misinformation / fake news on social media mainly
Facebook before 2016 and after 2016 elections in the US. This paper is interesting in a sense
that it uses how novel data on social media usage can be used to understand important
questions in political science around media platform’s content moderation practices . In the
data collection the authors have complied list of sites producing fake news by combining five
lists from previous academic studies. i.e. 672 fake news sites . They gathered monthly
Facebook and twitter engagements on all articles / content published on all fake news
websites from January 2015 to July 2018 from Buzzsumo which is a commercial content data
base that tracks the volume of user interaction with internet content on Facebook , Twitter
and other social media websites . Due to data unavailability there were able to obtain data on
569 out of 672 fake news websites, But excluding 103 fake news was not an issue because
according to Alexa ( which measure web traffic using its global traffic panel ) reach of their
websites is only 0.0232% compared with 0.9012% for all other 569 websites in our sample.
As a point of comparison , there also took same outcome for stories on a set of major news
channels , set of small nonpartisan news sites and set of sites covering business and cultural
topics . Beside the site level data discussed above the authors also collected data on a list of
specific URLs’ spreading misinformation that were outsourced from fact-checking website
snopes.com which yields an immediate sample of 535 article URLs’ . After data screening a
sample of 11,351 URLs’ via Buzzsumo data base final sample of 9540 false stories URLs’
were collected. The author found that interactions for all comparison group remained
relatively stable for the past two years , following similar trend on Facebook / Twitter . While
fake news interactions increased steadily on both platforms from the beginning of 2015 up to
2016 elections . But interesting following the elections Facebook engagements fell sharply , a
decline of around 50% . It is important to note that absolute quantity of interaction of both
platforms Facebook / Twitter with fake stories remains large and Facebook in particular
played on outsized role in its diffusion . Establishing causality is the desire of any social
science research paper . Although authors have tried their level best to make their data as
comprehensive as possible but there are many factors that could generate selection bias such
as efforts by producers of misinformation to evade detection on Facebook by changing their
domain name. Similarly, although Buzzsumo data is obtained directly from Facebook API
and from Twitter however we do not have any internal validity of the accuracy . In addition,
it is possible that our results are affected by the 103 websites upon which we do not have data
on about social media interactions. The authors runned several robustness checks such as
inter-rater reliability , restricting sample size , excluding outliers and found their results to be
consistent across all checks. Although there is little evidence on how the scale of
misinformation has evolved in recent years.