With the ease of publishing on the Internet, misinformation has gotten worse. The COVID-19 Pandemic seems to have raised it to a new level of attention. There would seem to be a premium on making sure the information is accurate. That doesn't seem to be the case.
It is unlikely that there will be a single explanation for that. Unreliable news sources were better at producing content that matched what readers were looking for, according to researchers based in Paris.
The researchers thought of the news as a function of supply and demand. The Italian public is interested in getting answers to specific questions. News sources are trying to meet that demand. Quality information is not produced by organizations in the news ecosystem. Poor reporting can be due to carelessness or to satisfy an agenda.
It is one thing to describe all of that, but it is a different thing to figure out how to get numbers that allow you to analyze how the system works.
In this case, the researchers had access to a number of tools. The database of all the articles published by Italian media allows researchers to analyze the supply half of the equation. There is a database of Italian media sources that fact-checkers have identified as unreliable due to publishing errors or misinformation, allowing them to be analyzed independently from general media. The database isn't a complete list of unreliable sources, so this shouldn't be considered a comprehensive analysis of the misinformation landscape.
AdvertisementFor the demand side, they turned to the search engine, which tracks the search terms people are interested in and the information they are looking for. Since it doesn't cover the whole population, it is an imperfect method, but still gives a general picture of what many people are interested in.
The researchers chose several popular search terms to study the behavior of the news marketplace. The Pope andeurovision were also popular during this time. The first wave of infections to August 2020 are tracked from when the virus was first identified in China.
On average, the public's interest would appear on the day before reliable media reported on the topic. The news from unreliable sources was quicker than the average news source. The faster speed was not simply because the less reliable sources were able to react more quickly. When compared to reliable online news outlets, the unreliable ones tended to be quicker to place stories that reflected search terms.
When this context was considered, it was found that articles from questionable sources fit the public. This is a persistent pattern and it held true daily throughout the study period.
Reliable sources seem to produce more relevant articles more quickly and better match the content of those articles with what the public is most interested in. The study isn't able to explain why these outlets are better able to meet the public's interests, but the finding hints at why misinformation spreads.
We need to look beyond Italy to see if this behavior happens anywhere else. The researchers created an index based on the mathematic relationships between search terms and news output. We should be able to determine if the relationship applies to other topics where misinformation is common.
Human behavior in 2021. About DOIs: 10.1038/s41562-022-01353-3.
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