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How does fake news spread ? », BBC Bitesize

Vick Hope: Emotions! We share them all day. Quite often we don’t say anything, the right emoji
does the job for us. We feel. With fake news, we feel a lot. Latest research shows that only two
percent of young people can spot fake news. With a bit of know-how, there’s no reason we can’t
change that figure to 100 percent. Fake news deliberately plays on our emotions and it’s our strong
reactions that make us want to hit the share button, understanding how this works is the first step
to fighting back.

Student: All fake news is based off a feeling.

Student: It’s all about making something boring really extreme.
Student: When we share things it’s because we’ve felt an emotional connection to it.
Dr Radha Modgil: So fake news affects our emotions in two ways. It contains dramatic and
emotional headlines and words to drag us in, like best, worst, terrible, exciting, they really provoke
an emotional reaction and often the stories also contain the word “you”, so you feel directly
affected and drawn in by the story.
Student: People do make headlines that are quite extravagant to draw people in.
Student: Everything’s got to be really dramatic and in capital letters.
Dr Radha Modgil: Then once it’s got our attention it then causes a really strong emotional reaction
in us, so we feel we have to share it. There’s an area on our brain called the amygdala which
actually responds to emotional drive and that becomes over-activated or has increased activity
when we’re reading a fake news story. Studies have shown that actually it only takes one 250th of a
second for us to react to emotional content, so basically that means that there’s no time at all for us
to think, respond and critically analyse that information. Fake stories leave us at the mercy of our
basic instincts.
Vick Hope: Because of the way it works on our emotions, once you share a fake story it will travel
much faster and further than a real one.
Alastair Reed: Everything emotional online travels faster and whether it’s gossip or whether it’s
sensational lies about someone or something, it’s much more interesting often than quite boring or
complex truths so people are much more likely to share it.
Vick Hope: And the more you see fake stories the more your brain leads you to believe it’s true.
Student: I think if you see a story more than once you’re more likely to believe it than if you see it
once.
Student: Because surely not this many people would be getting it wrong.
Student: Then you start believing it because you’ve just seen it more and more, and more people
are starting to share it and you’re like “Oh, this must be real”.
Claire Milne: And that’s known as the Illusory Truth Effect. So that’s basically just the more you
hear something repeated the more likely you are to think it’s true whether it is or whether it isn’t.
Vick Hope: And every time we like or share a fake story it acts like a big thumbs up, telling all our
accounts that we want more and that’s what we get. More and more fake stories.