I would never help make social media a worse place than it already is

Social media is horrible. Twitter (no, I refuse to call it X) claims to be the town square of the internet, but unfortunately, it is the town square where the village idiots meet. Other social media sites are no better and the situation has become so bad thanks to the constant insults, fake news, and terrible ads that dominate everyone’s feed, that I have left social media altogether (with the exception of LinkedIn for professional reasons).

Hence, I don’t care anymore how bad people behave on social media and how much fake news is spread on these platforms. And my life has become so much better since I left all social media behind. Since I am no longer affected by social media, I have no incentive to help people make it a worse place than it already is. If social media gets worse and worse, people may eventually decide they had enough and leave these platforms or demand real change.

But should you want to make social media an even worse place, how would you go about it? As I said, I have no incentive whatsoever to make other people’s life miserable while being unaffected by the deterioration on these platforms. So, I would never do anything as mischievous as spreading information how to spread fake news on social media, for example.

Why would I do such a nasty thing?

But in case I did want to make social media a worse place – and I repeat, I would never do that – how would I go about it?

First, I would look up the research that has been done on how fake news and lies spread on social media. I would probably read through a paper like this one in Nature Scientific Reports. In there, I would find that making fake news and lies spreads on social media is somewhat counterintuitive but not that hard.

False rumours, as the authors call it in the paper, has an average half life on social media of 149.6 hours (six days and 5.6 hours) while true rumours have a half life of 71.6 hours (not even three days). Fake news stays around twice as long as the truth on social media and spreads much more. Thus, spreading fake news helps you go viral and become more influential on social media than telling the truth.

Relative frequency of positive and negative language in fake and true rumours

Source: Pröllochs et al. (2021)

But from my past experience with social media, I thought that if I wanted to spread fake news, I would have to emphasise negative emotions and doom and gloom. Yet while fake news is on average more negative than the truth, if you want to make fake news go viral and last longer you have to do something unexpected. You have to be positive. To quote from the paper: “Compared to true rumours, a one standard deviation more positive sentiment for false rumours is linked to a 61.44% increase in the cascade size, a 37.59% increase in the cascade lifetime, and a 4.81% increase in structural virality”. For the truth, it is the opposite. Negative sentiment and emotions create longer-lasting social media cascades.

I cannot emphasise enough that I would never advise social media users to create tweets with fake news and positive sentiment to go viral or ruin social media. To quote Mark Zuckerberg from his testimony to the US Senate in 2018: “Senator, we consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas.” And so do I. What you do with the ideas on my platform is not my problem…

Marginal mean of cascade size (a), cascade lifetime (b), and structural virality (c) for different sentiment of the social media post

Source: Pröllochs et al. (2021)