The distorting effects of producer strategies: Why engagement does not reveal consumer preferences for misinformation

AUTHORS
Alexander J. Stewart, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, UK
Antonio A. Arechar, Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico
David G. Rand, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Joshua B. Plotkin, Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

SIGNIFICANCE
Online misinformation shapes public discourse and world affairs. But we have a poor understanding of the principles that govern its spread. We use game theory to study engagement with misinformation, modeling the interplay between news producers and consumers. We show that even truth-seeking consumers can be induced to engage with false stories by strategic news producers who wish to spread misinformation. We then use experiments to determine whether people prefer true or fake news. We find that consumers who engage with misinformation sites actually prefer to engage with accurate information, even while inaccurate articles from those sites generate greater overall engagement. Taken together, these results show that the way consumers engage with misinformation may not reflect their actual preferences.

ABSTRACT
A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers and producers. A key insight from the model is that observed patterns of engagement do not necessarily reflect the preferences of consumers. This is because producers seeking to promote misinformation can use strategies that lead moderately inattentive readers to engage more with false stories than true ones—even when readers prefer more accurate over less accurate information. We then empirically test people’s preferences for accuracy in the news. In three studies, we find that people strongly prefer to click and share news they perceive as more accurate—both in a general population sample, and in a sample of users recruited through Twitter who had actually shared links to misinformation sites online. Despite this preference for accurate news—and consistent with the predictions of our model—we find markedly different engagement patterns for articles from misinformation versus mainstream news sites. Using 1,000 headlines from 20 misinformation and 20 mainstream news sites, we compare Facebook engagement data with 20,000 accuracy ratings collected in a survey experiment. Engagement with a headline is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy for misinformation sites, but positively correlated with perceived accuracy for mainstream sites. Taken together, these theoretical and empirical results suggest that consumer preferences cannot be straightforwardly inferred from empirical patterns of engagement. MORE