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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by captain normal on Saturday March 10 2018, @06:13PM (1 child)
I don't know why MIT thought they had to fund a study on this. "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on".Has been noted for over 300 years. and has been attributed to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill among others. It's probably been in common thinking as long as people started using language.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ [quoteinvestigator.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:32PM
A bit like Hollywood always rehashing old stories, universities like to conduct "is this common-sense statement true?" studies.
It's a lot easier to get people's money, and press coverage, if you stay in familiar territory.