Last month brought a great deal of fanfare, and accompanying snarky outrage, about a new “Satire” tag on Facebook for content sources like The Onion. Yet fake “news” items — which run deeper than satire — continue to propagate rapidly across the site, as well as on other social media platforms, such as Twitter. In the past few days, huge numbers of Facebook users saw — and shared — a hoax about severe winter weather from Empire News, predicting “record-shattering snowfall coming soon.” Meanwhile, retweets of a “limited edition” Pumpkin Spice-flavored Durex condom image flooded Twitter timelines.

Most media coverage has approached this kind of rapid viral proliferation of fake content as a problem of consumer intelligence, an account both inflammatory and ableist. Furthermore, it ignores how news and social media, and social interaction itself, actually work. Cries for better media literacy aren’t wrong, but if we want to really push back against hoaxes and other misinformation online, we need to understand why they spread – and how we can stop spreading them.