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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:46PM
This may be due to confirmation bias.
That was my guess too. But that would also have to be studied.
Our news organizations even follow the method to tweak us. They use inflammatory headlines to draw us in.
"Fake News" is an amazing loaded term. Whoever invented it, my tip of the hat to them. It allows people to use their own cognitive bias to disregard what they do not like and forward along what they do. Pity it blew back on them.