Recently, students at MIT conducted a research project to determine how news (fake or otherwise) is spread through the social media platform of Twitter. In the end, they blamed the "humans, not bots, [for being] primarily responsible for [the] spread of misleading information." This ties back in with one of my previous posts, "Igniting Emotions with Fake News," in which I explained how anything with a strong emotional appeal can spread through the internet with ease. The fact that only humans are to blame truly brings to light the reality of our world and whether or not we, as a whole, are truly able to decipher the fact from the fiction. As interesting as satire is, it’s unclear if enough people fully recognize these funny sites as just that, jokes, or if they’re gonna form a mob over something that never actually happened.
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