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False Stories Travel Online Way Faster Than the Truth

Accepted submission by canopic jug at 2018-03-09 15:37:10 from the struth-mate dept.
Business

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 [inquirer.net]
and New Scientist : Fake news travels six times faster than the truth on Twitter [inquirer.net]
and The Economist : On Twitter, falsehood spreads faster than truth [economist.com].


Original Submission