Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mcloughlin, Killian L.; Brady, William J.; Goolsbee, Aden; Kaiser, Ben; Klonick, Kate; Crockett, M. J.
• 署名单位: Princeton University; Princeton University; Northwestern University; Yale University; Princeton University; St. John's University; Yale University; Brookings Institution; Harvard University; Princeton University
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-9759
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adl2829
• 发表日期: 2024-11-29
• 页码: 991-996
• 关键词: fake news; partisan bias; moral outrage; emotions; anger

摘要

We tested a hypothesis that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online, examining generalizability across multiple platforms, time periods, and classifications of misinformation. Outrage is highly engaging and need not be accurate to achieve its communicative goals, making it an attractive signal to embed in misinformation. In eight studies that used US data from Facebook (1,063,298 links) and Twitter (44,529 tweets, 24,007 users) and two behavioral experiments (1475 participants), we show that (i) misinformation sources evoke more outrage than do trustworthy sources; (ii) outrage facilitates the sharing of misinformation at least as strongly as sharing of trustworthy news; and (iii) users are more willing to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions that assume users want to share accurate information.