According to a study publicized in PNAS, there are a myriad of ways to mitigate misinformation on social networking sites.
“We study how communication platforms can improve social learning without censoring or fact-checking messages, when they have members who deliberately and/or inadvertently distort information,” the authors explained in their report.
“We characterize how the expected number of true minus false messages depends on breadth and depth of the network and the noise structure.”
The authors suggested that rather than relying on traditional means of mitigating misinformation, such as censorship, fact-checking, and education, web presence should set limits on the volume of messages shared.
“If you limit sharing, you could also be limiting the spread of good information, so you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that doesn’t really help you,” said one author of the study in a news release.
