Research Establishes 13-Hour Gap Between Viral Misinformation and Correction (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 10, 2016 @10:18PM from the just-enough-time-to-order-survival-supplies dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in China and America will soon launch a platform called Hoaxy, designed to identify and analyze what happens when misinformed news goes viral, and the processes which lead to a correction of the misinformation. The study, which compared 71 likely and prominent sources of inaccurate internet news over a period of three months to the same news stories on fact-checking sites, concludes that the average interval between viral diffusion of inaccurate news and the discovery of facts which disprove it stands at about 13 hours. Hoaxy uses a custom crawler written in Python and diffused via the Scrapy web crawling framework.

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Re:This will be put to good use, right? by Big+Hairy+Ian · 2016-03-11 00:26 · Score: 4, Funny

So now I've got to wait 13 hours to find out if this stories bogus? :D

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Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.