16 Policy Brief No. 22 Toda Peace Institute/Alliance for Peacebuilding Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed. (Vosoughi, Roy and Aral 2018) The design of social media platforms contributes to this problem. • Fake news stories often invoke fear or anger, resulting in greater attention and sharing. Social media algorithms then highlight these posts, further promoting misinformation and disinformation. • People who use social media primarily for entertainment may encounter fake news involuntarily. If they do not seek out other sources, this fake news may be their only encounter with news-related information. • Social media platforms do not distinguish the source of information through unique fonts, colors, or frames that could alert users to credible news sources. Facebook’s News Feed posts all look the same, regardless of the content, thus mixing our political, personal and commercial activities. (Vaidhyanathan 2018) • Anyone can create an account, or multiple accounts, on a social media platform to enable the anonymous sharing of disinformation. In the first quarter of 2018, Facebook reported that it disabled 583 million fake accounts. (Facebook. 2018) • On some social media platforms like WhatsApp, an instant messaging app owned by Facebook with over a billion users around the world, people can post a fake news story and circulate it within a group without any public exposure. This means that the rest of the public may never know that a fake news story has spread. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for fact-checkers or professional news media to counter the false information. Social media companies often say that they lack the capacity to reliably check for conspiracies, lies, and fake users. Faced with criticisms that they censor too many posts on one hand and allow too much hateful and violent content on the other, social media companies are struggling to come up with community guidelines and processes for removing misinformation and disinformation. WhatsApp asserts that it cannot monitor messaging on this app, although some assert that it could remove such content if it wanted to. (Gupta and Taneja 2018) 31. Undermining Accurate Information. Social media undermines authentic news in a variety of ways. In a report on the “Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism,” the Taylor Owen and Emily Bell note, “Journalism with high civic value—journalism that investigates power or reaches underserved and local communities—is discriminated against by a system that favors scale and shareability.” (Owen and Bell 2017) Social media platforms that collate news stories draw people away from the news sources where the stories first appeared. Consequently, the audience is reading the ads placed on social media, not the ads placed in newspapers. This change has had a dramatic effect on the financial viability of professional journalists and news producers who are doing the actual work of reporting.