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

Pterry was right...

[Eunuchswear]

It takes truth 13 hours to get its boots on.

Reach of misinformation

[RogueyWon]

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.

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".

time gap is useless generalized information

[sittingnut]

generalized/averaged time gap between misinformation and correction is practically useless, given the variety of, types of information, news sources, content of news and false news, and methods of correction, ( not to mention differences in languages, culture, internet penetration and habits, co-relation with offline media, etc).
given all that, time gap for each correction event , plotted on a graph, will spread thinly all along the time axis. averaging such data is absurd and meaningless.

to be useful the variety mentioned above needs to be narrowed to specific categories. for instance, financial misinformation and correction about companies ina industry listed in a particular stock market reported in a specific group of news sources.

A lot of it is deliberate

[MikeRT]

The amount of garbage that I see posted on Facebook that is not only blatantly wrong but you-should-know-better-so-I-assume-dishonesty wrong is incredible in some places. My favorite example off the top of my head is the meme showing a pie chart with the federal budget that shows the military at 60% of the budget and some self-righteous line to the EBT piece that says "Republicans thinking cutting this will balance the budget." Well, guess what, that pie chart is the discretionary budget. That part is about 20% of the entire federal budget. Those of us who actually know enough about the government that our founding fathers wouldn't be embarrassed to let us vote actually notice things like "WTH are Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment and servicing the national debt?"

The majority just lap that garbage up. Left or right and in between. Doesn't matter. The more it confirms their biases, the more their brains shut down.

If Facebook wanted to censor something useful instead of legitimate German outrage over the complete disregard for popular opinion on the migrant issue, they could start with a lot of the "political" pages on Facebook that spread more dezinformatsiya than a Soviet state TV station on coke.

Re:This will be put to good use, right?

[Big Hairy Ian]

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

Re:Time difference

[louic]

Obviously the US is not a single timezone. And not all people wake up at the same time either. That does not change the fact that it may be interesting to look into this coincidence.

How this study will be interpreted...

[MiniMike]

Soon we will have some nutjob claiming that any news story older than 13 hours must be true.

By this time tomorrow, someone else will have linked to this post to support that claim.