Why does misinformation spread more effectively than information? Emotion reportedly predicts easier acceptance and efficacy reportedly predicts faster spread. However, scientific information is not designed to appeal to either of these. Scientific reports are often inconclusive and suggest that further research is needed, rather than offer conclusions and efficacious solutions. They are also designed to mitigate bias, producing work that can only manipulate emotions as well as its topic does. There may be cause to believe that the spread of misinformation is not only a matter of what misinformation offers to knowledge processing, but also what factual information fails to offer.

Facts Are Not Designed to be Spread

Research has revealed that fabricated policy news on Twitter gains retweets quicker and more often compared to true policy news. In general, claims without justification are spread more frequently than claims with verifiable sources. 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research on tweets from the first half of 2020 found that the words ‘Us’, ‘India,’ ‘Wuhan,’ ‘Coronavirus,’ ‘China,’ and ‘Might’ are commonly used words when it is the case of misinforming tweets. Most tweets were sent in March, around the beginning of the pandemic. Misinforming tweets gained a large amount of spreading, regardless of factuality or popularity.

Twitter and the Spread of Early COVID-19 Misinformation

Gupta, A., Bansal, A., Mamgain, K., Gupta, A. (2022). An Exploratory Analysis on the Unfold of Fake News During COVID-19 Pandemic. In: Somani, A.K., Mundra, A., Doss, R., Bhattacharya, S. (eds) Smart Systems: Innovations in Computing. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 235. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2877-1_24

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