In June, the journal Nature published a perspective suggesting that the harms of online misinformation have been misunderstood. The paper’s authors, representing four universities and Microsoft, conducted a review of the behavioral science literature and identified what they characterize as three common misperceptions: That the average person’s exposure to false and inflammatory content is high, that algorithms are driving this exposure, and that many broader problems in society are predominantly caused by social media.
“People who show up to YouTube to watch baking videos and end up at Nazi websites — this is very, very rare,” said David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research who is also a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Media Accountability Project. That’s not to say that edge cases don’t matter, he and his colleagues wrote, but treating them as typical can contribute to misunderstandings — and divert attention away from more pressing issues.
