The dirty open secret about our mainstream social media platforms is that they are riddled with bots and fake news. As such, it is nearly impossible to know anymore whether a trending news article is fake or not. In a previous article, we have told you how fake news may have affected the 2016 US elections. However, researchers recently discovered an even worse side-effect of this continuous barrage of fake news. Apparently, fake news can lead to the creation of false memories. In fact, even after the readers are told that the news they read was fictitious, they still refused to budge from their point-of-view. In this article, let’s look deeper into the results of the study and how it can affect political events in the future. We will also see how VID can prevent this from happening by nipping the fake news infestation in the bud.

How fake news (possibly) changed the course of history

It was long suspected that Russian bots and fake news may have played a critical role in the 2016 US presidential elections. Facebook revealed in late October 2017 that Russian bots might have reached and influenced 126 million Facebook users. The Internet Research Agency, a Russian company linked to the Kremlin, had allegedly posted 80,000 divisive content on Facebook, reaching 29 million users between January 2015 and August 2017.

Along with Facebook, these foreign agents managed to publish more than 131,000 tweets from 2,700 Twitter accounts and uploaded over 1,100 videos to YouTube. Because these content pieces were highly divisive and incendiary in nature, it was easy for them to go viral during the election period, when people were more emotional than usual.

So how much did Russia’s disinformation campaign affect the 2016 elections? The University of Tennessee-Knoxville conducted a study and this is what they found out after analyzing 770,005 tweets in English from known Russian troll accounts, as well as corresponding poll data from FiveThirtyEight’s archive of multiple polling outlets.

Every 25,000 retweets of Russian accounts correlated to a 1% increase in Trump’s poll numbers one week later.

25,000 retweets are about 10 retweets per tweet.

The retweets did not have a similar effect on Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.

91% of the first retweeters of known Russian bots were non-Russian bots, indicating that the propaganda had reached real U.S. citizens who had willingly retweeted the bots.

Situation to get worse?

As per newly released results of a 2018 study, voters can potentially form false memories after reading fake news stories, as long as they align with their existing political beliefs.

During their study, researchers recruited 3,140 eligible voters online and asked them how they are planning to vote on the 2018 referendum legalizing abortion in Ireland. During the study, the voters were given six news reports of which two were fake news depicting political ideologies from either side of the issue. After reading each story the researchers asked them if they had heard about the event in the story before and if they had any specific memories about it. This is what the researchers found:

Half of the respondents reported a memory for at least one of the fake events.

Many recalled significant details about one of the fake stories.

The people in favor of abortions were more likely to remember something false about the referendum opponents. Those against legalization were more likely to remember a falsehood about the proponents.

Several participants recounted details that the false reports didn’t even include.

When they found out that some of the news articles were fake, they refused to even reconsider their memory.

Lead author Gillian Murphy of the University College Cork said in a press statement:

“In highly emotional, partisan political contests, such as the 2020 U.S. presidential election, voters may ‘remember’ entirely fabricated news stories. In particular, they are likely to ‘remember’ scandals that reflect poorly on the opposing candidate.

This demonstrates the ease with which we can plant these entirely fabricated memories, despite this voter’s suspicion and even despite an explicit warning that they may have been shown fake news.”

What’s the solution?

The problem that we have at hand is a scary situation. Not only are people forming fake memories based on fake news, but they are also vehemently defending these memories even after knowing that the stories may not be valid! As memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, Irvine, said:

“People will act on their fake memories, and it is often hard to convince them that fake news is fake. With the growing ability to make news incredibly convincing, how are we going to help people avoid being misled? It’s a problem that psychological scientists may be uniquely qualified to work on.”

There is another solution that can be looked into, which doesn’t include psychological scientists. Most of these fake news articles are spread by bots or bogus accounts. What if we had a social media platform that could nip these bots in the bud?

When we built VID, we wanted to create a place where our users could share and create their memories without having their timeline muddied by fake accounts. This is why VID has been built in such a way that only the users that have gone through our stringent user verification process will get access to a public profile. Without going through a verification process, users will still be able to use much of the features available, however, they won’t be able to post their memories publicly. For verification, a user needs to do one of the following:

Get their account verified by five friends. In return, the verifier receives a period of free access to the premium tier. In the premium tier, the user will be able to save unlimited memories.

Users can opt for a paid account and extra privileges via credit card payment with a card which has the name of the VID account holder.

Finally, the user can upload a government-issued photo identification document which will be verified on an automated system.

We believe that our verification process will keep VID completely bot-free and free from discourse manipulation. We respect our users and we want them to build their opinion on facts and not manipulation.