Read the following excerpt from the Lawfare Blog, How Misinformation Spreads on Social Media—And What To Do About It:

For researchers, isolating the effect of misinformation [is] extremely challenging. It’s not often that a user will share both accurate and inaccurate information about the same event, and at nearly the same time.

Yet shortly after the recent attack in Toronto, that is exactly what a CBC journalist did. In the chaotic aftermath of the attack, Natasha Fatah published two competing eyewitness accounts: one (wrongly, as it turned out) identifying the attacker as “angry” and “Middle Eastern,” and another correctly identifying him as “white.”

Fatah’s tweets are by no means definitive, but they do represent a natural experiment of sorts. And the results show just how fast misinformation can travel. As the graphic below illustrates, the initial tweet—which wrongly identified the attacker as Middle Eastern—received far more engagement than the accurate one in the roughly five hours after the attack:

Worse, the tweet containing correct information did not perform much better over a longer time horizon, up to 24 hours after the attack:

(Data and code for the graphics above are available here.)

Taken together, Fatah’s tweets suggest that misinformation on social media genuinely is a problem. As such, they raise two questions: First, why did the incorrect tweet spread so much faster than the correct one? And second, what can be done to prevent the similar spread of misinformation in the future?

Reflect:

Why do you think the wrong information spread faster in this instance?

Who do you think is responsible in this case for the bad information spreading further than the good information -- even after it was revealed as bad?

Assuming you saw the wrong information and were thinking of sharing it, what might you do to double-check its likely validity?