How do you out-trump fake news?

How do you get your (true) story heard?

It turns out Mulder and Scully were wrong. It’s not the truth that’s out there, but the lies. Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was so fired up by the lies he found on social media after the Boston Marathon bombing he decided to investigate fully. He found, “Tweets containing falsehoods reach 1,500 people on Twitter six times faster than truthful tweets”.

He and his team found that while true stories rarely reached more than 1000 Twitter users, the worst false news stories usually reached well over 10,000. False news spread faster and more broadly for all kinds of news, but the problem was particularly acute for political news.

Is this research more fake news? 

Vosoughi and his colleagues collected twelve years of data from Twitter, starting in 2006. They looked at tweets about news that had been investigated by six independent fact-checking organizations, such as PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org. They collected a dataset of 126,000 news items shared 4.5 million times by 3 million people. They used this dataset to compare news spread which had been verified as true with the spread of stories shown to be false.

Smacked bots? 

A natural reaction, given the current media scrutiny, is to blame bots. Stripped-to-the-waist, bear-wrestling, ice-swimming PCs are doing their Russian master’s bidding, perverting our better selves and rigging democratic elections across the world.

It’s what the researchers first thought. So they used bot-detection technology to remove the bots’ social media shares. But the results were the same: false news still spread at around the same rate and to the same number of people. Which means human beings were responsible for the virality of false news.

Two reasons why fake news reaches more people faster

The researchers then looked carefully at the content. They found that tweets with false information had new information that a Twitter user hadn’t seen before compared to those with true information.

The false news tweets also created different emotional reactions: users expressed greater surprise and disgust. The novelty and emotional catalyst seemed to be what was causing more retweets. “If something sounds crazy stupid you wouldn’t think it would get that much traction,” says Alex Kasprak, a fact-checking journalist at Snopes in Pasadena, California. “But those are the ones that go massively viral.”

Is invention the necessity to be heard?

If you’re in the business of ‘who gives a twit?’ populism the findings are great news. Carry on fomenting outrage. However, if you’re trying to inject some sanity into the debate, the research could be the cue to embrace your inner snowflake and retreat to a safe space.

If you want your story to be heard the solution would appear to invent outrageous lies. Or, as a friend who used to work for a tabloid newspaper, said, the cry from her head of the news every day was, “Make it live! Make it sing! Make it up!” The PR maestro Lynton Crosby espouses a version of this, called the “dead cat” strategy.

Boris Johnson describes the strategy: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.” In fact, Vosoughi’s research suggests Johnson has only half understood the dead cat strategy. The outrage, alarm and disgust are actually a crucial part of why it is so successful.

StoryWorks 

Certainly these two qualities: surprise and high emotional engagement are what we find are the key qualities that make for memorable and engaging stories in our storytelling workshops. The STORIES framework (Surprising Touching Obstacles Risk Individual Details Empathetic character Simple) we use is based largely on these two fundamental human qualities. And the neuroscientist, Paul Zaks, has traced the chemical causes of why they’re so successful.

An impossible challenge?

If we want our stories, our true stories, to have the same appeal as the virus-mimicking fake ones, we need to do two things. First, we need to stop believing that the facts will be enough to reach and engage our audiences. Second we need to use the same techniques of surprise and emotional engagement. Yes, it does need more work. It needs a bit of digging, questioning, talking things through. Stories that enchant an audience take a little more time to tease out. But if we want the truth out there, it’s worth rolling up our sleeves.