Many people share fake news on social media because they’re simply not paying attention to whether the content is accurate — not necessarily because they can’t tell real from made-up news, a new study suggests.

Lack of attention is the driving factor behind 51.2% of misinformation sharing among social media users according to researchers from MIT, the University of Regina in Canada, University of Exeter Business School in the United Kingdom and Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico. 

The experiments reveal a host of insights on why people share misinformation on social media:

📰 One-third — 33.1% — of participants’ decisions to share false headlines were because they didn’t realise they were inaccurate.

📰 More than half of participants’ decisions to share false headlines — 51.2% — were because of inattention.

📰 Partisanship was a driving factor behind 15.8% of decisions to share false headlines on social media.

📰 Twitter users who previously shared content from Breitbart and Infowars were less likely to share misinformation after receiving private messages asking them for their opinion of the accuracy of a news headline.

📰 During the 24 hours after receiving the messages, these Twitter users were 2.8 times more likely to share a link to a mainstream news outlet than a link to a fake news or hyper-partisan website.

s or hyper-partisan website.

This study is so interesting, because at OneSub, we work hard to make sure you see stories from across multiple platforms to make sure you're getting the news from every angle to ensure it's as accurate as possible.

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