Outrage drives the spread of misinformation on social media

Social media posts containing misinformation evoke more moral outrage than posts with trustworthy information, and that outrage facilitates the spread of misinformation, according to a new study by Killian McLoughlin and colleagues.

The researchers also found that people are more likely to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first. The findings suggest that attempts to mitigate the online spread of misinformation by encouraging people to check its accuracy before sharing may not be successful, the researchers note. McLoughlin et al. conducted eight studies using U.S. data from Facebook and Twitter over multiple time periods, along with two behavioral experiments, to learn more about outrage related to the spread of misinformation.

In the study, outrage is defined as the mix of anger and disgust triggered by perceived moral transgressions. The researchers found that outrage-evoking posts facilitated “the spread of misinformation at least as strongly as trustworthy news.” People may share outrageous misinformation without checking its accuracy because sharing is a way to signal their moral position or membership in certain groups, note McLoughlin et al. The way that social media platforms rank content to show to users likely also plays a part in the spread of misinformation, they add: “Since outrage is associated with increased engagement online, outrage-evoking misinformation may be likely to spread farther in part because of the algorithmic amplification of engaging content,” they write. “This is important because algorithms may up-rank news articles associated with outrage, even if a user intended to express outrage toward the article for containing misinformation.”