A lot of studies have been performed on the nature of fake news and it's spread on social media sites:
- "Perceived social presence reduces fact-checking"
- "Echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates"
- "Epistemic Factors in Selective Exposure and Political Misperceptions on the Right and Left"
- "Politically Motivated Reinforcement Seeking: Reframing the Selective Exposure Debate"
- "Helping populism win? Social media use, filter bubbles, and support for populist presidential candidates in the 2016 US election campaign"
A problem I have with a lot of these studies is how they seem to ignore the structure of a person's personal network. For example, I'm going to trust a post on psychology from someone who frequently makes accurate posts on the topic more than I'm going to trust one from my crazy meme-posting uncle.
I would trust ignoring this factor if most people didn't have accurate estimations of the knowledge level of the people in their social networks? Has there been any studies examining how accurately people keep track of who they trust on what topics? Does this accuracy affect how accurately they detect false information spread in their social network?
