My book, "Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age" was out a few weeks ago. As promised, I follow with some threads on the content of individual chapters. Here the sixth one. 1/8 amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Evolu… 
It is a *long* chapter about the spread of online misinformation, broadly intended as factually incorrect claims. I first discuss various reasons why misinformation could be favoured online. 2/8
These include the fact that everybody can actively spread information, that online hyper-availability can boost the illusion of consensus (the idea that your belief is more widespread than what actually is)... 3/8
that online anonymity can limit repetitional costs, that social media algorithms optimise for (shallow) engagement, i.e. information eliciting clicks, likes, etc. - remember Upworthy? upworthygenerator.com 4/8
I do not find any of the above completely persuasive and I also discuss studies showing that the spread of online misinformation is relatively limited, and that the effects of misinformation, in terms of changing people’s mind, are limited too 5/8
Still, misinformation do exist. My hypothesis is that misinformation, since does not need to be constrained by reality, can be built (consciously or not) to be more “attractive” to our cognitive predispositions. See also this paper of mine: nature.com/articles/s4159… 6/8
Cultural transmission experiments show that some kinds of content are better are spreading than others, such as negative (vs positive) content, threat-related information, content eliciting disgust, etc. 7/8
Online misinformation often build on the same features: online misinformation is not low-quality information, but high-quality one, with “quality” not being truthfulness, but how it fits with our cognitive predispositions. 8/8
The goodies: The New Your Sun reports on the presence of life on the moon hoaxes.org/archive/permal…
Andrew Gelman on the "necessary" role of social media
A Science study claiming that false news spread "farther, faster, deeper and more broadly" than true ones (cited more than 1,000 times in a year) may be often misinterpreted
The biggest fake news in Facebook in 2017 buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…
How cognitive attractive features make cultural traits more successful, from direct-gaze portraits... sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
...to the trickeries in electronic slot-machines press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…
Plus plenty of transmission chain experiments, and let's not forget CARTOON KILLS, from the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.
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