 Have you ever come across a piece of news on your Facebook or Twitter that seems to absurd to be true? Probably because it wasn't. It could be what they call fake news. Did you still go ahead and click on it? Even worse, did you share it? Because you thought it was so absurd that it was interesting and you could get more likes. Well, it turns out that your innocent share might actually do more damage than good to all the other news out there that's actually real. A group of researchers at MIT found that false news or fake news spreads much faster and to many more people than true news. The study found that more users tweet about false news at a faster rate. False news also goes deeper, which means that it gets more retweets than true news. True news took six times longer than false news to reach 1500 people. So how does this false news spread? Who spreads it? Where does it come from? Many believe that bots or internet robots spread this false news on the internet. But they actually don't have much of a role to play. It's us humans who are in fact responsible for this widespread circulation of fake news. So then how does fake news spread so wide and far without the bots? Perhaps a retweet from an influential person or a share from a celebrity with thousands of followers? No, apparently even that's not it. The MIT study found that people that tweeted false news had accounts with significantly fewer followers. They followed fewer people and they didn't even spend too much time on Twitter. So then how does fake news get so popular? The researchers found one thing that all false tweets had in common. The content was more novel and stood out as compared to the tweets which had information that was actually true. Users react to false tweets with greater surprise or disgust. Strong emotional reactions equals to more retweets. False tweets gave users information which was more out of the ordinary. And for this reason false tweets were more popular. And in this world of false news and false information, it's fake political news that spreads the fastest. What is the impact that fake news has on regular social media users? Can a simple retweet of a scandalous, not real sounding story have an effect on your life? Prabir Purgayosta, Editor-in-Chief of NewsClick, is going to throw some light on the threats posed by fake news. Well, I think this is a very significant finding because it says this is not being spread by bots. It's not that some people have paid money to buy virality, which is what a lot of people thought was happening. It also seems to show that there is something deeper that carries what you call fake news and what the research calls as false news. Partly because what is fake and not fake itself has become now politicized in the United States. Donald Trump talking of any news that's critical of him is fake news. So I think it is important to register what is significant in this research. It is that it is not bots, it is not a few influencers who are pushing the news. It's really people with not too many followers but being taken up by the quote unquote novelty of the news. When you come across novelty, very few times you have something which is completely unexpected which shows up in real world. Yes, there are few occasions that happens, a typhoon, a major political event like assassination, for instance, Boston bombing, Marathon bombing, etc., etc., but there are few and far between. And they do also exhibit similar properties of quote unquote virality as the false news is supposed to have. I think there are two things which we also need to register in the research itself. One is that, A, people have preconceived notions, they have prejudices. So anything which is not happening in the real world but which plays into the prejudices of the people will also virality. Because people think that that is true but somehow the world is not admitting it and therefore when they suddenly see something which is, say, amongst the white supremacists, something which says genetically whites are superior, if such a news comes, immediately you will get a traction. Similarly, in India, if we had the case of Ram Setu, for instance, and suddenly Lord Rama being hundreds of thousands of years old started circulating on the so-called man-made structure which was supposed to come from a certain science channel. Of course, it never came and we never saw anything further on that. But the sheer fact that there is a prejudice with respect to how they look at Indian history and therefore the novelty of this news then causes the virality. And here the novelty is really not the issue. It's a prejudice with which this novelty, in which this novelty is playing that issue. So I will say that what this research does not really talk about is the fact that societies have prejudices, deep prejudices and any quote-unquote novel news which plays into that prejudice is also seen to have a great degree of virality. And quite often what we are thinking is a virality of false news is really the virality being driven by the prejudice of the societies that we are in. And I think that's something which still needs to be looked at. What are the implications then for social media platforms which we are using to spread these news? How much can we then rely on these platforms as a source of news? Because these days where do we go for news? We go for two places like Twitter. Twitter is the most common source of news for people these years. Well here is the problem. The news creators or the content creators are not Twitter and not Facebook nor Google. All of them are really platforms and because they are platforms and YouTube is another platform but of course that's Google as you know. Because the platforms are where we are getting our news from and they themselves are not even curators of news. They are only platforms in which other news is being played and being played by actual people by putting it over there in different forms. So we are in a situation where there is a dichotomy with the power of the platforms and the relative shall we say weak influence that those who create content have and the argument used to be that if we let everybody play at news then you will get a more democratic news and therefore it will reduce the monopoly. Those who are creators of content reduce the monopoly of the stranglehold on quote unquote truth and allow a more democratic expression of news. What seems to have happened is the opposite. What we have got is even more opinionated even more mythical news as it were being propagated because the platforms have separated from the content creators. So we have a problem. The problem becomes bigger once we realize that if this research is true then falsity or shall we say the novelty of the news if that is the major element in which which contributes to virality there is very little we can do algorithmically to stop the propagation of false news. This is the I think the major learning that we need to take from this that platforms which have been talking and Facebook has been talking about it quite a bit that we will use artificial intelligence will use this will use that the reality is the platforms by their very definition who rely on algorithms will not be able to do this. The problem is even bigger because actually the business model of all the platforms are based on virality. So therefore their advertisers everybody who looks for advertisements who drive advertisements who pay for advertisements look for virality and for the platforms look for virality because that's how they make more money. So as somebody has written that the best minds of this generation are now making shall we say creating software so people will click more. So then now we have a better understanding of where fake news like because of the study we have a better understanding of where fake news is coming from and how it's spreading. And that bots don't really have a role to play and it's humans who are mostly doing it. So then what is the way forward. How do we then how can we then come back fake news. Well I think there are two sets of issues that we have to react to. One is that we have to accept that we need what shall we call what we can call digital. I will not use the word literacy. I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. But we need to have digital knowledge that this society has to be much more digitally conscious. It has to accept that if there is something being spread far and wide like this it's probably not real. That OK it's novel but it's not real. It's like cat videos nice to look at but really of no significance. So I think that degree of shall we say skepticism about virality of news is something we have to build into the digital consciousness of the people. And the studies learnings are very important. They tell you they don't believe anything that you see just because it's there on Twitter or Facebook so that you know treat novel news as something deeply suspicious. The second part I think that's a much more pressing issue right now is we need to regulate the platforms platforms of enormous power. They are completely outside regulation. They make money hand over fists and don't pay any taxes. So this whole shall we say power of the platforms which have grown over the last 5 to 10 years. It poses a risk to all societies today. And if we see at the kind of monopolies we have generated companies like Google and Facebook have generated more monopoly power in 10 years. Then the oil companies which is why the oil companies are broken up in the United States for example the oil companies did in 100 years. So I think that is also something which is dangerous for society. And the fact that this virality of news can lead to another social consequences. I think is another good reason why we need to have regulation for this platform. The problem that we have is there is no way today given the kind of international law and the given the kind of internet regular internet structures of control that we have built. Mainly at the basically at the behest of the United States that regulating internet regulating monopolies is very difficult at the moment because United States has made it virtually that all internet will be regulated or controlled by US law. This is what I can for instance does because it is located in the United States. Therefore all real legal authority over the internet today was to the US government which is completely against any regulation of the internet. Because at the moment its monopolies are the one which are having this global monopoly. I think that is something we need to look at the international level at the level of law at the level of regulation and only a proper regulation of these platforms would reduce the kind of monopoly power they have got. And I think that is oppressing it for all of us.