Why the blazing speed of information spread in modern era

might actually be bad for us.

Thesis
In the age of social media and online news, information spread at an unprecedented rate in history.
If you use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, you can gain, or overwhelmed by, a lot of
information every day, to the point that if you skipped using it for a short period of time, you might
not have the slightest idea about what people are discussing.

The problem with how fast information spread in the era of internet is we are usually fed with a new
information before we can optimally process the previous information. We are unintentionally being
pressured to react quickly to any given piece of information before knowing the full picture. How
many times we overreact to something, only to find out later that it was just a lie? Let us refresh our
memories, in 2016, there was a big media sensation called “The Balinese Iron Man” who made his
own mind-controlled robotic arm. It gained a lot of traction even from corporate news companies.
However, a few weeks later we found out that the robotic arm was not as sophisticated as he
claimed. Looking back, by analysing the piece of information we had, it was actually very easy to
pinpoint why the contraption can not in any way work as advertised. The opposite is also true, we
often forget or dismiss important information simply because another new information has already
barged in at your computer screen.

I believe that we all could benefit from a slower pace of information spread, giving us time to
process the information and react accordingly, while giving us the necessary amount of time to
address important issues without being distracted by a flood of new information.

Body
Refute the opposition’s point
While it can be argued that the current pace of information spread might give us some benefit, often
times the harms simply outweigh them. Even if we might have the ability to reject receiving new
information without first analysing it thoroughly, most of the population cannot. In some cases, this
often proves to be harmful not only at individual level, but also at a regional or even global scale.

Let us take a look at the current issue of coronavirus. When the virus started spreading in the
country, the panic it induced due to the sensationalist headlines and the spreading of uncertain
information led to the hoarding of masks and essential items, which ultimately worsen the condition.
Back to the present, most people do not seem to regard the issue as that important anymore (or
worse, believe in unfounded conspiracy theories) and rarely observe the social-distancing rules,
exacerbating the condition for the second time.

We also saw similar trend during the 2019 presidential election, where we are bombarded with a lot
of fake information during the time leading up to the election, causing much disturbance in public
life and even led to separation of familial and amical ties.

Supporting evidence
To support my position that often times the harms outweigh the benefit, I will show you how it is
much easier to spread lies than truth on the internet. This might happen because of various reasons,
such as the degree of novelty and emotional reactions of the recipients; however, the hard-cold fact
is that lies are more easily accepted than truth. We also know that robots are actively spreading
both fake and true news to improve engagement. However, researches suggest that they are
spreading fake and true news at approximately the same rate, making humans the primary factor in
the spreading of fake news.

In a 2018 research about the spread of true and false news online
(https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146), it is found that lies spread faster than
truth. In a data set of Twitter tweets from 2006 to 2017, about 126,000 rumours were spread by
approximately 3 million people for 4.5 million times. What is more concerning is that false
information took 6 times faster than truth to reach 1500 people, and 20 times faster to reach 19
levels of retweets. Falsehood was also retweeted by more unique users than truth at every retweet
level. It also found that robots spread true and false news at similar rate.

Another research by Pew Research Center in 2019 (https://www.cnet.com/news/fake-news-more-

likely-to-spread-on-social-media-study-finds/) also conveyed similar result. About 60% of US adults
who prefer getting news through social media said they had shared false information, while 51% of
US adults who prefer getting news through other means (television, radio, news website, etc.) said
they had shared fake news.

From our own country, the Kemenkominfo identified almost 500 hoaxes during April 2019 alone,
209 of those are related to politics (https://news.detik.com/berita/d-4532182/kominfo-identifikasi-
486-hoax-sepanjang-april-2019-209-terkait-politik). This might be related to election that would take
place at that year.

Closing
It is evident that the fast spread of information creates more harm at a huge scale, from pandemic
misinformation, political lies, or outright scams. We also found that the false news spread much
faster than the truth, which the pace of information spread helps exacerbate.

We might not be able to control how the media and general population behave when spreading
news, but we might be able to influence those closest to our circles. Let us educate them to be
responsible when spreading and reading information, be it from social media or from news
networks. After all, most of the false news on the internet are spread by normal people, like you and
me, or our relatives.

Fake news has proven to be detrimental in many aspects of our life, but together we can start
filtering the news that we spread and decelerate the pace at which information spread.

Thank you.