A few daysafter Donald Trump was elected, 35-year-old Eric Tucker saw something suspicious: A cavalcade of large white buses stretched downmain street near downtown Austin, Texas.Tuckersnapped a few photos and took to Twitter, posting the following message:Tucker was wrong ' a company called Tableau Software wasactually holding a 13,000-person conference that day and had hired the buses. But as the New York Times noted last year,it hardly seemed to matter.Theerroneous post got shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook and 16,000 times on Twitter, mostly by right-wing Americans drawn to the idea that people on the left had orchestrated an anti-Trump conspiracy. Trump even appeared to join in:Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!' Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016Tucker subsequentlyacknowledged his error in a new tweet. But a week later, the truthful posthadonly gotten retweeted 29 times, according to the debunking website Snopes.Why did the false tweet get so much more attention' A new study published June 26in the journal Nature looks into why fake postslike Tucker's can go so viral.Economists concluded that it comes down to two factors. First, each of us has limited attention. Second, at any given moment, we have access to a lot of information ' arguably more than at any previous timein history. Together, that creates ascenario in which facts compete with falsehoods for finite mental space. Often, falsehoods win out.Diego F. M. Oliveira, the study's lead author and a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana University and Northwestern University,tested this idea by creatinga theoretical model for the spread of information. The model was loosely based on epidemiological models that public health researchers use to study the spread of disease. Oliviera's team had bots or "agents" produce messages containing new memes ' essentially fake news ' on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and re-share messages created or forwarded by their neighboring bots in a network."Quality is not a necessary ingredient for explaining popularity patterns in online social networks," Oliveirawrote in his paper, adding,"Paradoxically, our behavioral mechanisms to cope with information overload may ... increas[e] the spread of misinformation and mak[e] us vulnerable to manipulation."In other words, the study suggests thatmost people only focus on real newsfor short amounts of time, so addingfake news to the mix leads to more competitionfor our attention. Every few minutes, we make quick decisions about which facts to accept and whichto discard. In the process, we may end up disregarding factual information simply because there is so much of it out there.According to theauthors of the study, the fact so many people get news from theirsocial media feeds could also make it harder to distinguish truth from fiction. It's tough to vet the source of a social media post, and arecent studysuggests that people base their evaluationof a piece of information more onthe person whoshared itthan the organization thatproduced it .Those who saw Eric Tucker's tweet about the buses had no way toknow whether the vehiclesin Tucker's photos were actually linked to anti-Trump activity.'I'm ... a very busy businessman and I don't have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don't think it's going out there for wide consumption," Tucker told the Times.SEE ALSO:This Cornell scientist saved an $11-million industry ' and ignited the GMO warsDON'T MISS:Trump demands apology from 'Fake News Media' in raging morning tweetstormJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: Megyn Kelly defends controversial interview with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
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