Why Twitter is the creator of fake news

Protagonists of the post-information era, where do fake news originate from? In this article, I want to demonstrate that Twitter is not just hosting fake news. Its very presence creates them.

Is it possible that even today, people still fall for fake winning lottery tickets? A quick search on google will show you that the answer is yes, and a lot… Reading the news on google, we soon realized that many of these people, out of naivety, sometimes led by emotional appeals from the embezzlers, end up getting carried away and falling into old scams.

Realizing that our society has people who still fall for this type of scams helps us understand also why so many people believe in the most extravagant lies possible, as is the case with those we find today on the internet: the so-called fake news. With little education and critical capacity, ordinary people, receiving a flood of news packed by information fraudsters, are incredibly vulnerable, especially when we have no significant concerns in educating them for digital life. But this is another subject.

An interesting fact is that there are studies on a hormone called dopamine that helps us understand fake news success. Known as the reward hormone, dopamine stimulates us to repeat actions that make us feel good. One of them is linked to learning, especially to novelty. The problem with dopamine is that when we overdo it, we develop a compulsion, an addiction, as in the case of drug abuse or even when we use social networks.

Social networks, in particular, exploit our addiction to novelty with mastery. For example, when we receive a notification with a red icon and a number in the middle saying that there is something new there, it is almost impossible to resist. This effect is due to dopamine. But what happens when novelty ends? How do we keep the dopamine machine working? Well, if we don’t have any news, we can always create them…

Every media that has been introduced into society throughout history has increased the scale of information production — consequently increasing demand for information or novelty. It is estimated that around 1450, at the time of Gutenberg, there were about 12 thousand literary works in the world and that 50 years after the introduction of the printing press, that number jumped to 12 million works. Picture how many authors it took to produce that much information in such a short period of time. After all, it takes months or even years to write a book. What about the arrival of electricity in the 19th century and the mass production of daily newspapers. How much information had to be produced daily in order to supply the need for novelty that newspapers imposed on the world? Well, If we don’t have that much news, let’s create them! Yellow journalism was born, an ancient relative of the fake news whose job was to fabricate novelties at that time.

Nowadays, look at what Twitter became. Essentially, it is a microblog, where people worldwide produce content and news every day at an unprecedented rate, much more than books and newspapers have ever done. Let’s face it, in this sea of ​280 characters posts, how many of them are really interesting, significant, and new? It is hard for reality to provide novelty at that speed. So, we make it up.

Art has been exploring this gimmick for a long time. Its strategy is to create alternative realities to delight the viewer, create something that did not actually happen but is new, charming, interesting. So much so that sometimes you would like it to be true. But in defense of art, and to separate the sheep from the goats, it must be said that art lies honestly, being sincere about its content.

Anyway, is Twitter the creator of fake news in the digital form? History shows us that new communication media introduced into our society creates greater demands for content production. Often, when faced with news scarcity, media tend to force its manufacture to meet our endless addiction to novelty. Art tries to supply this need when reality itself is not enough. Thing is, producing artwork is hard, it is time-consuming, which is not the case of fake news. This characteristic makes fake news much better suited for the challenge of content production of the digital age and in this scenario, 280 characters seem to be the perfect amount.