We don’t need a study to know that misinformation is rampant on social media; we just need to do a search for “vaccines” or “climate change” to confirm that. A more compelling question is why. It’s clear that, at a minimum, there are contributions from organized disinformation campaigns, rampant political partisans, and questionable algorithms. But beyond those, there are still a lot of people who choose to share stuff that even a cursory examination would show was garbage. What’s driving them?
That was the question that motivated a small international team of researchers who decided to take a look at how a group of US residents decided on which news to share. Their results suggest that some of the standard factors that people point to when explaining the tsunami of misinformation—inability to evaluate information and partisan biases—aren’t having as much influence as most of us think. Instead, a lot of the blame gets directed at people just not paying careful attention.
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Source: Negligence, Not Politics, Drives Most Misinformation Sharing | WIRED