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

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:02PM (#650602)

    This is from the abstract:
    "We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications."
    "snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.about.com"

    Oh dear my. All the supposed "fact-checking organizations" are staffed by liberals and seem to be funded by liberals. Trump could say he likes burgers, and they would rate it "Pants on Fire" or "100% false" because there was one time he was seen eating meatloaf.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by legont on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:18PM

    by legont (4179) on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:18PM (#650608)

    Perhaps, a better title would be "The People's news travel faster than politically correct news"?

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.