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Research Establishes 13-Hour Gap Between Viral Misinformation and Correction (thestack.com)
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.
A particular information is that the "correction" often fails to travel as far as the original misinformation. There are plenty of examples of this, though a particularly effective case study is the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, where a number of early pieces of misinformation on both the perpetrators (outcasts, "trench coat mafia", third-shooter) and the victims (specific targeting of individuals, religious martyrdom) went viral gained traction and remain part of the popular perceptions of the event today, despite having been disproved and corrected shortly after they were issued. Simply put, the misinformation was a better and "more comfortable" story than the truth (which is often the case - reality has a nasty habit of being messy, while our brains seem to like tidy stories).
On that basis, this looks like a worthy study. That said, given the Chinese connection, I do have to wonder whether this study isn't just going to be a vehicle for proposing blanket media-censorship.