Is it easy to spread misinformation in the far right community in Facebook?

In 2020, such as the Corona 19 epidemic, BLM (Black Lives Matter), and the U.S. presidential election, it was news that greatly shaken society. As a result, fake news spread in a large amount on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. A research team at New York University reports that the erroneous spreading methods on Facebook are significantly different, driven by political ideology.

The research team focused on the Facebook page, which provides a variety of news sources with an average of more than 100 followers. For this 3,000 pages of analysis, political ideologies were evaluated by an independent organization as extreme right, slightly right, neutral, slightly left biased, and far left, and follower reactions such as the number of page followers and comments were numerically analyzed.

Then, I found that the Facebook page, which was rated as far right or far left, had a high follower response. In the case of pages rated as far right, it turns out that there are overwhelmingly many likes and shares. In other words, the far right Facebook page is more engaged than other ideologies.

In addition, when looking at the number of real and fake news sent from each ideology’s Facebook page, in the far right, there were 260 real news, while more than 420 fake news. The far-right Facebook page shows that the number of news deliveries is remarkably high, and it is the only one that delivers more fake news than other ideologies.

Facebook has a structure that increases social density and facilitates information dissemination as the user’s response index to the Facebook page increases. The New York University research team revealed that the results of this analysis show that the error information flowing on the right is likely to be considered the most attractive content on Facebook. He also pointed out that the far-right fake news sources were far more numerous than other ideologies, and pointed out that the results are quite dangerous for Facebook, which uses participation to promote the community and advertising. Related information can be found here.