on Twitter. It had then spent time evolving on Reddit forums,
becoming catchier in the process, before spreading more widely.[114]
It’s not just politicians who can pick up on fringe content. Online
rumours and misinformation have spurred attacks on minority groups
in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, as well as outbreaks of violence in Mexico
and India. At the same time, disinformation campaigns have worked
to stir up both sides of a dispute. During 2016 and 2017, Russian troll
groups reportedly created multiple Facebook events, with the aim of
getting opposing crowds to organise far-right protests and counter-
protests.[115] Disinformation around specific topics like vaccination
can also feed into wider social unrest; mistrust of science tends to be
associated with mistrust in government and the justice system.[116]
The spread of harmful information is not a new problem. Even the
term ‘fake news’ has emerged before, briefly becoming popular in the
late 1930s.[117] But the structure of online networks has made the
issue faster, larger and less intuitive. Like certain infectious diseases,
information can also evolve to spread more efficiently. So what can
we do about it?
T was the largest in the country’s
history. It was powerful enough to shift the Earth on its axis by several
inches, with forty-metre-high tsunami waves following soon after.
Then the rumours started. Three hours after the earthquake hit on 11
March 2011, a Twitter user claimed that poisonous rain might fall
because a gas tank had exploded. The explosion had been real, but
the dangerous rain wasn’t. Still, it didn’t stop the rumours. Within a
day, thousands of people had seen and shared the false warning.
[118]
In response to the rumour, the government in the nearby city of
Urayasu tweeted a correction. Despite the false information having a
head start, the correction soon caught up. By the following evening,
more users had retweeted the correction than the original rumour.
According to a group of Toyko-based researchers, a quicker response
could have been even more successful. Using mathematical models,
they estimated that if the correction had been issued just two hours
earlier, the rumour outbreak would have been 25 per cent smaller.