People may share fake news because they're not paying attention, not because they can't tell whether it's accurate

"Many Americans share fake news on social media because they’re simply not paying attention to whether the content is accurate — not necessarily because they can’t tell real from made-up news, a new study in Nature suggests," Denise-Marie Ordway reports for The Journalist's Resource, a service of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.

"Lack of attention was the driving factor behind 51.2% of misinformation sharing among social media users who participated in an experiment," she writes. "The results of a second, related experiment indicate a simple intervention — prompting social media users to think about news accuracy before posting and interacting with content — might help limit the spread of online misinformation."

"The study highlights not only the pitfalls of social media, but the existential obligation of news media to point those out — preferably on social media, where it could make more of a difference," said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog. "We like to say that journalism practices a discipline of verification: We tell you how we know something, and we're fact-based. Social media are opinion-driven and have very little discipline or verification."

Other findings from the experiments:

• 33.1% of participants said they shared false headlines because they didn’t realize they were inaccurate.
• 51.2% of participants said they shared false headlines because they were inattentive.
• Participants reported valuing accuracy over partisanship. Self-analysis is questionable, but the finding challenges the idea that people share misinformation to benefit their political allies or harm their foes. Nearly 60% of participants who completed a survey said it’s "extremely important" that the content they share on social media is accurate. About 25% said it’s "very important."
• Partisanship was a driving factor behind 16% of decisions to share false headlines on social media.
• Social media platform design could contribute to misinformation sharing. According to the study's authors, the results suggest that the current design of social media platforms, which encourage users to scroll quickly through a mix of news and opinion content, may discourage people from thinking about accuracy before sharing.
• Twitter users who previously shared content from right-wing sites Breitbart and Infowars were less likely to share misinformation after receiving private messages asking them for their opinion of the accuracy of a headline. During the 24 hours after receiving the messages, these Twitter users were 2.8 times more likely to share a link to a mainstream news outlet than a link to a fake news or hyper-partisan website.