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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:01AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:01AM (#650833) Journal

    I don't know -- Yellow Journalism was a term coined over a century ago and it seems the press has often been nothing but a tool for pushing the agenda of the oligarchy. The Spanish-American war and WWI being older examples, Yellow Cake, poison gas, and Russian Troll Farms being the current incarnation. I don't think there is a golden age of journalism to hearken back to -- just a long stream of marketing by oligarchs who wish to rob, cheat, and kill their fellow countrypeople for personal profit.

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