How Does Social Media Misinformation Impact Democracy?

Social media platforms were created to be venues for people to share, access, and use information. 

In concept, that sounds great for democratic institutions. The efficacy of democracy is predicated on informed individuals making informed decisions about how they want their government to look. Democracies thereby need the spread of information to massive degrees, especially when they’re trying to educate their voters.

Democracies objectively need to have accurate and accessible information for their participants to consume. When voters go to the polls, being educated is essential. In fact, proper education is one of the cornerstones of democracy itself.  But, what happens when the information being interacted with, and thereby the basis of American votes, is wrong?

The way that social media algorithms are set up doesn’t lend well to the democratic principle of legitimate news. This happens through the spread of misinformation. 

Since democracies give everyone an equal opinion, misinformation can have multiple negative impacts. Misinformation can sway voters with unfounded theories, create extremism, and discourage faith in the democratic process itself. 

Let’s take Twitter, for example. Twitter uses learning algorithms: relevant posts end up being shown the most at the top of feeds. This means that highly engaging content is likely to be then spread around at a faster pace. 

This places a significant emphasis on retweets and engagement, as both factors are weighed heavily in how Twitter prioritizes posts that people see.

Political misinformation, however, is prevalent on Twitter. Outrageous tweets are easier to engage with, mainly when they feature scary taglines that introduce wild theory or story. 

Research confirms this, and the numbers are shocking. MIT conducted a study back in 2018 and found that misinformation on Twitter is 70% more likely to be retweeted than truthful news. Even crazier, it takes true stories six times longer to reach 1500 people. 

Going back to Twitter’s retweet-based algorithm, which ranks highly engaged posts better than others, the link between social media and misinformation now becomes pretty clear. 

Soroush Vosoughi, a co-author on the paper, explains that misinformation’s nature of shock value can make it more prone to retweets:

“People respond to false news more with surprise and disgust,” he notes.

This misinformation, which is usually political, can have real-world impacts on how people vote. The U.S recently saw Latino voters being targeted with mass amounts of social media misinformation during the presidential election, which allegedly succeeded in swaying votes away from Joe Biden. 

Voters casting ballots based on misinformation are not good, and it certainly doesn’t help democracy’s founding principles.