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False Stories Travel Online Way Faster Than the Truth

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 10 2018, @04:52PM   
from the struth-mate dept.

canopic jug writes:

A study shows that misinformation spreads faster and farther than correct information:

An analysis of news stories tweeted by three million people between 2006 and 2017 shows that fake news spreads significantly more than the truth on social media.

[...] Truthful tweets took six times as long as fake ones to spread across Twitter to 1,500 people – in large part because falsehoods in the sample were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, even after accounting for account age, activity level and their number of followers. The most viral fake news was political in nature.

The study was carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Social Machines.

From The Inquirer.net : False stories travel way faster than the truth, says study
and New Scientist : Fake news travels six times faster than the truth on Twitter
and The Economist : On Twitter, falsehood spreads faster than truth.

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Original Submission

• Well, like the saying goes Well, like the saying goes (Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:09PM (2 children)

  by krishnoid (1156) on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:09PM (#650604)

  "A fake story can make it to all leaf nodes while a true one is still getting encapsulated in layer 3." -- Mark Twain

  Please make sure you spread that one around, with attribution to its original source :-)

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:Well, like the saying goes Re:Well, like the saying goes (Score: 3, Funny) by requerdanos on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:14PM (1 child)

  by requerdanos (5997) on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:14PM (#650606) Journal

  Thanks. I have added this to my quotations database with the "attribution" link pointing to your comment.

  Parent

  • Re:Well, like the saying goes (Score: 4, Funny) by captain normal on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:35PM

    by captain normal (2205) on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:35PM (#650628)

    Now that's the kind of verification the white house likes. Here it is...it's on the interwebby....it must be true!

    --
    Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--

    Parent