When Facebook started letting users post text on top of colored backgrounds in 2016, it seemed like a fairly benign way to get people to share more personal thoughts on the platform.
Over the past few weeks, some of the most viral hoaxes on Facebook have spread in the form of text posts. They make salacious political claims without linking to any website or attaching a photo or video. They often come from regular Facebook users instead of Pages or Groups.
Last week, a hoax claiming American senior citizens have to pay for Medicare while undocumented immigrants don't got more than 510,000 likes, shares and comments on Facebook. The post was just black text on a white background, but it still got hundreds of thousands of more engagements than a debunk from Factcheck.org.
(Screenshot from Facebook)
Near the end of January, another text post got massive engagement on Facebook. That one also had to do with undocumented immigrants and got 13,000 more engagements than a fact check from PolitiFact. Earlier that month, another text post got 180,000 more engagements than another fact check from the Poynter-owned outlet.
First, research shows that visual misinformation spreads further on social media than text-based posts. Photos regularly beat out fact checks on social media. So by adding a visual element, in this case, a colored background, users can attract more eyeballs (and shares) than a mere bogus claim in a text status.
Second, Facebook employs artificial intelligence to try and detect duplicate fakes on the platform. Once it finds a new hoax that's already been debunked elsewhere by one of its fact-checking partners, it automatically downranks it. But that system could be hampered by the fact that there are no links or visually similar elements of text posts that can be used to identify when a false claim gets repeated by multiple users.
Finally, the reason false text posts get so much reach could have to do with the reason they were created in the first place: they facilitate more personal sharing. As WhatsApp's misinformation problem illustrates, people are more likely to believe bogus claims if they're shared by people they know and trust. Claims in text posts inherently come from users themselves, not other websites, so their friends might be more likely to share them.
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