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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: 2) by deimtee on Sunday March 11 2018, @02:53AM
It's a nice idea, but journalism was never that pure. It has always been that only the occasional individual journalist had honesty and integrity. These few, over time could build up a reputation and credibility with the public.
Where it has gone bad is that the corporate owners realised they could 'monetize' that credibility, and have spent it all. There are probably still honest journos out there, but they don't work for commercial big media, mostly they have a blog of some sort. There are a few still holding out in the BBC and Oz's ABC, but they are under fire too.
The big problem is the sheer quantity of information. You can find twenty different stories about the same event, all internally consistent and apparently objective, but mutually contradictory. How the hell do you ever sort out the truth?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.