The Role of Emotion in the Dissemination of ‘Fake News’

The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.

In ‘fake news’, there is a relation between the content, its dissemination, and the users involved in that dissemination. ‘Fake news’ itself can also be distinguished into mis-, dis-, and malinformation; here, misinformation is false but not harmful (e.g. misleading content), malinformation is harmful but not false (e.g. leaks and hate speech), and disinformation is both harmful and false (e.g. manipulated and fabricated content).

Beyond such definitions of the term ‘fake news’, there are als honest mistakes by reporters, satire and humour, partisan discourse, clickbait, and the automated and algorithmic amplification of such content, for instance; the latter might happen through fake accounts, targetted advertising, or organised trolling, for instance. Further, the circulation of this content is also affected by our own everyday digital behaviours, including active posting, commenting, and liking, but also our choices in following and unfollowing others.

Online (dis)information may be assessed for its level of facticity, its intention to deceive, and its positive or negative valence. Such information now circulates especially through social media, where it is possible to engage in the precise targetting of users based on their expressed preferences, and where influence structures are based on follower numbers and network structures rather than pre-existing institutional status. This could also lead to the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles, Flavia suggests, and the danger here is that this could create a more fragmented, divided society.

Much of the dissemination of content through digital and social media is also driven by affect rather than facticity; ‘fake news’ ties into the economics of emotion on these platforms, and seeks to engender group emotions or ‘fellow feelings’ amongst those who encounter it. Some scholars claim that the minds of social media users are ‘clouded’ by emotions. (Oh dear.)

The present study examined the role of emotion in engagement with ‘fake news’ in an artificial experiment where Romanian news users were confronted with various ‘fake news’ stories using different levels of emotion as well as irony. Users were then asked how likely they were to share that content through social media. Negatively biased ‘fake news’ were most likely to be shared by audiences; positive emotions were not enhanced by positively biased ‘fake news’, and attenuated by all types of negatively biased ‘fake news’. Such negative ‘fake news’ has the greatest viral potential, then. Parody and satire has less potential to go viral. All of this may or may not be limited to the Romanian context, however, and it is difficult to generalise from this artificial experimental setting to ‘fake news’ in the wild.