The use of social media has increased throughout the world, including emerging and developing nations in recent years. And, across the 11 emerging economies surveyed for this Pew Research study, 28% of adults say social media is very important for helping them keep up with political news and other developments occurring in the world.

Simultaneously, the spread of misinformation has reached new heights. With the pandemic ransacking the globe, it has become vital to separate facts from fiction and stop the harm from false statements. Today, the question of what we hold as a true and trusted piece of information and not is key, but the boundaries between the two are becoming increasingly blurred. So what happened?

According to Kevin Kelli, the co-founder of Wired magazine, “Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.” When you think of it, most online content is created, shared and altered by people online. Add the lack of attention to whether the information is accurate, and you have a toxic cocktail for reproducing countless inaccurate and false content.

Meanwhile, this new study published in Nature that involves an experiment conducted by a group of researchers from MIT, the University of Regina in Canada, University of Exeter Business School in the United Kingdom and Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico, showed some interesting findings about the way people perceive what’s inaccurate online.

“It seems that the social media context may distract people from accuracy,” study coauthor Gordon Pennycook, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Regina, told The Journalist’s Resource. According to him, although people are often capable of distinguishing between true and false news content, they fail to even consider whether content is accurate before they share it on social media.

According to Pennycook, “The downstream effect of improving the quality of news sharing increases with the influence of the user who is making better choices.” He added: “It may be that the effect is as effective (if not more so) for users with more followers because the importance of ‘I better make sure this is true’ is literally greater for those with more followers.”