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.

Comments

Re:Reach of misinformation

[LaurenCates]

It isn't just websites.

It seems to me than in any given group, it's always "whoever's version of the story goes public first is the one whose version is most imprinted upon people and is least likely to change in the minds of people who heard it".

When a controversy broke in a group I was part of, we had a woman who cried to anyone who would listen about a smaller group of "harpies" (in the larger group) that were bullying her. It came out later - and was treated with much less urgency - that she was abusing her domestic partner! Said woman had the most ardent defenders, and the other group, which, best as I can figure, was trying to extricate the partner from the situation and while not entirely innocent, ended up vilified. To this day, people in that group have more or less swept the whole nasty business under the rug and like to pretend it didn't happen.

I call it "the power of the first complaint".