Too good to be true, too good not to share: the social utility of fake news

ABSTRACT While fake news has been widely reviled as an attack on democracy, less has been written about its threat to interpersonal relationships. Social networks have become increasingly popular for sharing news and as a result have also offered fertile ground for the spread of fake news. This paper considers the impact of the latter on the former, particularly in circumstances where the sharer either does not know or does not suspect that the news they are sharing is fake. This distinction is important because while sharing information and news may be construed as a social good, sharing news that turns out to be fake might negatively impact relationships. How do people react when the news they have shared with the intention of fostering social cohesion turns out to be fake, and as a result damages that cohesion? Based on 12 focus groups, this study examines how social media users react to fake news and how it affects interpersonal relationships between sender and receiver.

[1]  Terry Ann Knopf.  Rumors, Race and Riots , 1975 .

[2]  Hyun Suk Kim.  Attracting Views and Going Viral: How Message Features and News-Sharing Channels Affect Health News Diffusion. , 2015, The Journal of communication.

[3]  R. Rose,et al.  What Are the Origins of Political Trust? , 2001 .

[4]  C. Debout,et al.  [The focus group]. , 2014, Soins; la revue de reference infirmiere.

[5]  Henry Jenkins,et al.  Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture , 2013 .

[6]  H. Wilke,et al.  Bad news transmission as a function of the definitiveness of consequences and the relationship between communicator and recipient. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  M. Basil,et al.  Interpersonal Communication in News Diffusion: A Study of “Magic” Johnson's Announcement , 1994 .

[8]  Michael Russell,et al.  Drawing on Education: Using Student Drawings To Promote Middle School Improvement. , 1998 .

[9]  R. Berganza,et al.  Political Trust among Journalists: Comparative Evidence from 21 Countries , 2014 .

[10]  Jihyang Choi.  News Internalizing and Externalizing , 2016 .

[11]  Sinan Aral,et al.  The spread of true and false news online , 2018, Science.

[12]  A. Rubin,et al.  Predictors of Internet Use , 2000 .

[13]  R. Kelly Garrett,et al.  Electoral Consequences of Political Rumors: Motivated Reasoning, Candidate Rumors, and Vote Choice during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election , 2014 .

[14]  Heng Ji,et al.  Tweet, but verify: epistemic study of information verification on Twitter , 2013, Social Network Analysis and Mining.

[15]  Veronika Karnowski,et al.  News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks , 2015 .

[16]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  6. Katz, E. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications , 1956 .

[17]  Zhichao Cheng,et al.  Accumulation mechanism of opinion leaders' social interaction ties in virtual communities: Empirical evidence from China , 2018, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[18]  Chei Sian Lee,et al.  That's news to me: the influence of perceived gratifications and personal experience on news sharing in social media , 2011, JCDL '11.

[19]  Richard A. Krueger,et al.  Focus groups : a practical guide for applied research / by Richard A. Krueger , 1989 .

[20]  Jonathan Bright.  The Social News Gap: How News Reading and News Sharing Diverge , 2016 .

[21]  Benjamin A. Lyons,et al.  Partisan Media and Discussion as Enhancers of the Belief Gap , 2014 .

[22]  S. Sundar.  Self as source: Agency and customization in interactive media , 2008 .

[23]  D. Boyd,et al.  Sociality Through Social Network Sites , 2013 .

[24]  Jarol B. Manheim,et al.  The One-Step Flow of Communication , 2006 .

[25]  Dan Berkowitz,et al.  Miley, CNN and The Onion , 2016 .

[26]  Chris J Vargo,et al.  The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016 , 2018, New Media Soc..

[27]  Nick Rochlin,et al.  Fake news: belief in post-truth , 2017, Libr. Hi Tech.

[28]  Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick,et al.  Choice and Preference in Media Use : Advances in Selective Exposure Theory and Research , 2014 .

[29]  Raymond J. Pingree,et al.  News Recommendations from Social Media Opinion Leaders: Effects on Media Trust and Information Seeking , 2015, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[30]  S. Shyam Sundar,et al.  Posting, commenting, and tagging: Effects of sharing news stories on Facebook , 2015, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[31]  P. Bordia,et al.  Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches , 2006 .

[32]  Katherine L. Milkman,et al.  What Makes Online Content Viral? , 2012 .

[33]  Brian E. Weeks,et al.  Predicting Dissemination of News Content in Social Media , 2013 .

[34]  Sarah Trenholm,et al.  Why People Pass on News: Motivations for Diffusion , 1979 .

[35]  Miriam J. Metzger,et al.  Social and Heuristic Approaches to Credibility Evaluation Online , 2010 .

[36]  A. Gouldner.  THE NORM OF RECIPROCITY: A PRELIMINARY STATEMENT * , 1960 .

[37]  S. Chaiken.  Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. , 1980 .

[38]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign , 1968 .

[39]  Diana C. Mutz,et al.  Communication and Public Opinion Plus Ça Change , 2011 .

[40]  N. Leech,et al.  A Qualitative Framework for Collecting and Analyzing Data in Focus Group Research , 2009 .

[41]  A. Tversky,et al.  Prospect theory: analysis of decision under risk , 1979 .

[42]  T. Shibutani.  Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor , 1966 .

[43]  Harsh Taneja,et al.  The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption , 2018, New Media Soc..

[44]  Jun Liu.  Mobile phones, social ties and collective action mobilization in China , 2017 .

[45]  Chei Sian Lee,et al.  Understanding news sharing in social media: An explanation from the diffusion of innovations theory , 2014, Online Inf. Rev..

[46]  Dov Cohen,et al.  The Emotional Broadcaster Theory of Social Sharing , 2005 .

[47]  Sidney Rosen,et al.  The Reluctance to Transmit Bad News , 1975 .

[48]  M. Gentzkow,et al.  Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election , 2017 .

[49]  Pablo J. Boczkowski,et al.  The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge , 2013 .

[50]  A. Bergström,et al.  News in Social Media , 2018 .

[51]  S. Sundar,et al.  Source Cues in Online News: Is the Proximate Source More Powerful than Distal Sources? , 2011 .

[52]  D. Trilling,et al.  From Newsworthiness to Shareworthiness , 2017 .

[53]  T. Harcup,et al.  What Is News? Galtung and Ruge revisited , 2001 .

[54]  J. Prasad,et al.  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RUMOUR: A STUDY RELATING TO THE GREAT INDIAN EARTHQUAKE OF 1934 , 1935 .

[55]  Chei Sian Lee,et al.  News sharing in social media: The effect of gratifications and prior experience , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[56]  M. Pantti,et al.  Fake News , 2016, The Future of Journalism: Risks, Threats and Opportunities.

[57]  Geoffrey Baym,et al.  The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism , 2005 .

[58]  Alton Yeow-Kuan Chua,et al.  Why We Share: A Study of Motivations for Mobile Media Sharing , 2009, AMT.

[59]  Prashant Bordia,et al.  Psychological motivations in rumor spread , 2005 .

[60]  Piotr S. Bobkowski.  Sharing the News , 2015, Fix What You Can.