Why do we fall for fake news?

Layering of sources on the Internet has overshadowed the role of professional gatekeepers.

In recent weeks, the amount of online fake news that circulated during the final months of the presidential race is coming to light, and exposing a disturbing revelation that threatens to undermine the country's democratic process.
Much of the analysis, however, has focused on the people who create these false articles - whether it's teenagers in Macedonia or satirical news sites - and what Facebook and Google can do to prevent its dissemination. But fake news wouldn't be a problem if people didn't fall for it and share it. Unless we understand the psychology of online news consumption, we won't be able to find a cure for what The New York Times calls a "digital virus."
Some have said that confirmation bias is the root of the problem - the idea that we selectively seek out information that confirms our beliefs, truth be damned. But this doesn't explain why we fall for fake news about nonpartisan issues. A more plausible explanation is our relative inattention to the credibility of the news source. I've been studying the psychology of online news consumption for over two decades, and one striking finding across several experiments is that online news readers don't seem to really care about the importance of journalistic sourcing - what we in academia refer to as "professional gatekeeping." This laissez-faire attitude, together with the difficulty of discerning online news sources, is at the root of why so many believe fake news.
Do people even consider news editors credible? Since the earliest days of the internet, fake news has circulated online. In the 1980s there were online discussion communities called Usenet newsgroups where hoaxes would be shared among cliques of conspiracy theorists and sensation-mongers. Sometimes these conspiracies would spill out into the mainstream. For example, 20 years ago, Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy's former press secretary, went on TV to claim that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a US Navy missile based on a document he had been emailed. But these slip-ups were rare due to the presence of TV and newspaper gatekeepers. When they did happen, they were quickly retracted if the facts didn't check out.
Today, in the age of social media, we receive news via email, and a variety of online platforms. Traditional gatekeepers have been cast aside; politicians and celebrities have direct access to millions of followers. If they fall for fake news, any hoax can go viral, spreading via social media to millions without proper vetting and fact checking. The problem is of the layered sources. When it comes to internet news, it seems that the standing of professional news agencies - the original gatekeepers - has taken a hit. One reason could be the amount of sources behind any given news item.
Imagine checking your Facebook news feed and seeing something your friend has shared a politician's tweet of a newspaper story. Here, there's actually a chain of five sources (newspaper, politician, Twitter, friend and Facebook). All of them played a role in transmitting the message, obscuring the identity of the original source. This kind of "source layering" is a common feature of online news experience.
Which of these sources is most likely to resonate with readers as the "main source?" Analysing news aggregator sites of varying credibility, such as Yahoo News (high credibility) and Drudge Report (low) can throw in some answers. These sites often republish articles that have originated somewhere else, and through our analysis we found out that readers usually pay attention to the chain of sourcing only if the topic of the story is really important to them. Otherwise, they are swayed by the source or website that republished or posted the story. It's not surprising, then, to hear people say they got their news from "sources" that don't create and edit news articles: Verizon, Comcast, Facebook and, by proxy, their friends.
When reading online news, the closest source is often one of our friends. Because we tend to trust our friends, our cognitive filters weaken, making social media feed a fertile ground for fake news.
The persuasive appeal of peers over experts is compounded by the fact that we tend to let our guard down even more when we encounter news in our personal space. Increasingly, most of our online destinations - whether they're portal sites, social media, retail sites or search engines - have tools that allow us to customise the site, tailoring it to our own interests and identity. Our research shows that internet users are less skeptical of information that appears in these customised environments. An experiment published in the current issue of the journal Media Psychology finds that study participants who customised their own online news portal tended to agree with statements like "I think the interface is a true representation of who I am" and "I feel the website represents my core personal values."
We wanted to see if this enhanced identity changed how they processed information. So we introduced fake health news stories - about the negative effects of applying sunscreen and drinking pasteurised milk - into their portal. We discovered that participants who had customised their news portal were less likely to scrutinise the fake news and more likely to believe it. What's more, they showed a higher tendency to act on the advice offered in the stories and recommend that their friends do the same. These findings explain why fake news thrives on Facebook and Twitter, social media sites where we're connected with our friends and have curated our own pages to reflect ourselves. Lulled into a false sense of security, we become less likely to scrutinise the information in front of us. We can't distinguish between real news and fake news because we don't even question the credibility of the source of news when we are online.
S Shyam Sundar is a Professor of Communication & Co-Director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University.
-The Conversation