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Scientists Prove That Truth is No Match For Fiction on Twitter (theguardian.com)
Researchers find fake news reaches users up to 20 times faster than factual content -- and real users are more likely to spread it than bots. From a report: "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it," wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. Now a group of scientists say they have found evidence Swift was right -- at least when it comes to Twitter. In the paper, published in the journal Science, three MIT researchers describe an analysis of a vast amount of Twitter data: more than 125,000 stories, tweeted more than 4.5 million times in total, all categorised as being true or false by at least one of six independent fact-checking organisations. The findings make for unhappy reading. "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information," they write, "and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information."
How much further? "Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top 1% of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people," they write. In other words, true facts don't get retweeted, while too-good-to-be-true claims are viral gold. How much faster? "It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people, and 20 times as long as falsehood to reach a cascade depth of 10" -- meaning that it was retweeted 10 times sequentially (so, for example, B reads A's feed and retweets a tweet, and C then reads B's feed and retweets the same tweet, all the way to J).
How much further? "Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top 1% of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people," they write. In other words, true facts don't get retweeted, while too-good-to-be-true claims are viral gold. How much faster? "It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people, and 20 times as long as falsehood to reach a cascade depth of 10" -- meaning that it was retweeted 10 times sequentially (so, for example, B reads A's feed and retweets a tweet, and C then reads B's feed and retweets the same tweet, all the way to J).
Not that the real journalism is readily available these days but sites such as Twitter are not in the running. Those wishing to be informed have choices but have to know the intent of the content provider. All need revenue, some have agendas. Choose wisely.
A: cnn, Fox, msnbc, cbs, abc..
(dont use so many caps)
The results will likely be totally dependent on who you use for a fact checker.
Occasionally there are major policy announcements that hit Twitter first. That's news.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Not to get philosophical but are they talking about the factual quality of twitter or it's "truthyness"
I mean for one thing I see much more satire and outright trolling, which is non-factual content but may contain "Truth"
I need a research grant to determine "why so many scientists waste time on the obvious"...
... film at 11
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Attributed, in various forms, to many (including Churchill, erroneously) but there is no clear indication of who the original author is.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
... which is truth and which is "fake news"?
People have been arguing that issue for thousands of years.
Putting religion aside for a moment, we generally use these things called "facts" to discern truth from bullshit. Not sure why you feel we're still validating how we do this thousands of years later. We still use the word "liar" too, which also has a pretty clear definition.
snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.about.com
Wrong question.
"What kind of a retard posts news from Twitter?"
If you have a nation full of retards . . . maybe Twitter is the best choice to reach them . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
There is real truth to the saying "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on".
Falsehoods have always spread much faster than the truth, it's just in the hyper connected world we live in, instead of taking a day to spread through the world (slightly longer before the age of electronic communications like telephone and telegraph), it takes just milliseconds.
Its spread on Twitter was explosive! I wonder if it ts true...
Real life is just simply boring. Spice it up a bit with some trendy lies and see what sticks.
...why did they publish their paper on Tweeter ?
You can lie with facts.
What's lost in all this is the difference between objective truth and subjective truth. All of these arguments seem to be debating differing subjective truths and extremists on both sides believe that their own subjective truths are absolute. Unfortunately one of those sides is massively over-represented in the media and control of online censorship.
NO WAY!
News is something that's fresh, has relevance AND IS TRUE.
Statements released 5 minutes ago and unchecked, are not news. They're just statements until proven true, and only then they become news.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The more it's believed.
Human intelligence never evolved to more easily paint an accurate picture of reality and how things actually are and work. It evolved as a social tool, a glue to bond together humans into strong and coecive social groups and to support complex languages and interrelation to better coordinate families and tribes into functioning single units. Our intelligence's ability to understand the world around us is just a convininent side effect.
Information bias is just an example of this. When faced with evicence that condradicts our strongly held beliefs, our gut reaction is not to reevaluate those belief, but to strongly deny said evidence, even to the point of attacking those who bring it to us. The harder you try to convince someone of something, the harder he/she resists, regardless of any insurmontable evidence you may present. His/her brain interprets an attack on his/her beliefs exactly like a physical attack on themselves, and they react accordingly.
Because from an evolutionary standpoint, being part of a strong, coesive social group was more advantagous for survival than having a more accurate understanding of reality.
Statements released 5 minutes ago and unchecked, are not news.
'X' might not be true, but "DJT said 'X" might be news in itself.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
You can lie with facts.
Yes, and you can also multiply the largest number in the world by zero, and get a similar value.
Facts + bullshit = bullshit. It's that simple, if you want truth to survive and thrive.
And here we have a perfect example of fake news generation, albeit it somewhat at the meta level.
Why is it that all the allegations against Trump start with, "If true..."? And why is it that they occur so often?
And why is it that the MSN ignores what is actually proved: collusion between HRC and Russia, private servers, DNC stealing the election from Bernie, etc?
Sorry, pal. But the fake news is not Trump. It is the cool aid that you are guzzling gleefully down.
we generally use these things called "facts" to discern truth from bullshit.
I see you are still in elementary school. Your entire perspective is based on a lie of trustworthyness.
In reality, we use observations to assess and document the causality we are aware of. In retrospect, some of those observations will be labelled as "fact" and others will be discarded as misunderstandings. Many facts of the past have been discarded when analyzed with more detail or new contradicting observations.
The above is true for hard sciences, social sciences, and history (many "facts" of archaeology have been found false with the discovery of more old texts and ruins). Theoretical mathematics only cares about consistency, lingual fields care primarily about communication, and artistic fields consider everything malleable for the sake of art.
Now, on to the summary:
"Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top 1% of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people,"
Without providing a numerical definition of "rarely", this looks like they are reporting the exact same rate of effect. 1% is pretty rare, and "between 1,000 and 100,000" is actually a more restricted range than "more than 1,000."
Aside from straight to lies, "alternative facts" are a huge problem. Things that are kinda true but which are misleading or deliberately omit important caveats.
Statistics are often abused as alternative facts, because you can work the numbers to say pretty much anything you like.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016...
#pizzagate
a lie is a forecast of truth: it will happen, eventually.
Sci-Fi is military journalism where facts and people and events are abstracted to protect the source.
Now about that Churchill bit: he bombed Dresden 2-days after peace and is related to Hitler both jews of ROTHSCHILD origin.
Truth is the emperor; doesn't need pants, past or future tense.
Not to be picky but it depends what the story is presented as
If the story is "DJT said X" that is news and true, as long as the quote is accurate
If the story is "X" then that may not be news or true.
LOL at MSM ignoring Hillary's private servers
Sign the petition demanding the White House take action against censorship on the internet. We need an internet Bill of Rights!
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/internet-bill-rights-2
Oh sure they talked about it a lot, but mainly saying it isn't a big deal.
Don't confuse, "get their news" with making it the news.
How many times have you read, "Twitter erupts!" followed by a "story" comprised mostly of Twitter idiots?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I find it deeply ironic the the hive of SJW and villainy that are FB and Twitter single-highhandedly created right-wing ideological fever swamps.
Before social media, it was mostly contained to a bunch of old senile people protesting with "Keep government hands off my medicare". Today, these cooks have a POTUS and SJWs gave them tools to do it.
Hahahaha.
They don't! What more confirmation do you need than this quote by Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Ever since early 2016 I've been thinking what we call facts is entirely statistical, and, what's worse, filtered by our perception. We'll take a claim as true -- pick any nontrivial contentious topic, such as humans are the cause of global warming -- if we *believe* that a large number of PhDs (a journalist wrote that their number is large, we didn't sit with those people at a conference) who we *believe* are credible (we've never witnessed their theses defenses, so we rely on N-th hand accounts) are making the claim, and not just making, but if (we believe) they are repeating it because we keep hearing about it over and over.
And for all any such claim won't do squat for us if we are not going to make an actual decision based on it. (A decision may be I won't eat gluten for a month.) All these fake news and their pseudo-real counterparts -- such as whose inauguration size is bigger -- are entirely useless, they are just fuel for arguing online.
Why we need to argue online about things that don't affect us is a different question...
... while the Truth looks for its sandals.
I'm a french model!
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7VOE/state-farm-the-internet-and-french-model
Aside from straight to lies, "alternative facts" are a huge problem. Things that are kinda true but which are misleading or deliberately omit important caveats.
Agreed. That is a growing problem. That said, I see "fake news" on a different level that lends itself more towards the liar-liar end of the bullshit spectrum.
Statistics are often abused as alternative facts, because you can work the numbers to say pretty much anything you like.
Absolutely agree with you here. Statistics is a form of data manipulation. More often than not, they are used to prove one's agenda and not much else. Personally I see the need for more regulation around the use of statistics because of the manipulative power they hold.
This just tells me that people who want to disseminate facts are very poor at communicating, and don't know the first thing about generating or countering mass appeal. The hucksters of the modern era (and before) don't peddle information, they peddle affirmation, and if you don't know how to combine the two, then knowing the truth will never be affirmative enough for people to care. This probably sounds like a hell of a balancing act, and it is, but refusing to do so or pretending that it's impossible is how people who do know the truth and tell it lose control of the narrative.
Before all other things in your life, be a good salesman - because with a good enough pitch, people will buy anything, for better or worse.
False claims are generally more interesting to read than true ones. It is not whether a story is true or false but whether a story is interesting that makes it popular
Yes we were wrong in the past, but we fixed our mistakes and now we promise, we are right this time! We found another mistake but we fixed that one too so now we are certain we are right! We found another mistake... We are right because we say we are right! The facts prove we are right. What the facts were adjusted to fit the narrative? Now they are right, we promise!
Facts are information which can be objectively evaluated, i. e. , everyone can in principle test them. Fake news are fiction, they are subjective and can either be based on lack of information, wishful thinking, or deliberate lies.
For example, steel tariffs have been issued by Trump is a fact. If they have a positive or negative impact on jobs in the US is speculation. While there are some interpretation which are more likely than others they are not fact but the interpretations + probabilities are.
It's just a sort of natural selection. The fake news which appeals to people's prejudices and desires is more appealing, and thus more likely to get forwarded. I'll bet there is tons of fake stuff which dies on the vine. Also, a lot of fake news is designed to specifically have that appeal, hence the term "clickbait." Meanwhile the truth is often quite prosaic, and doesn't often have that "zing" quality of proving us right all along.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Scientists observe. Mathematicians prove.
And most people hate poetry.
--The Big Short
Have gnu, will travel.
I searched for 'fake' on this slashdot topic and got hits.
I searched for 'bible' and 'linux', both which are 'the truth', and got no hits.
Slashdot comments are thus useless junk.
Twitter can take responsibility and issue rebuttals.
Twitter can resolve this by actively forcing a correction into the timelines of people who engaged with the falsehood.
Yeah, not every single time. Yeah, some qualifier needed as to which falsehoods get rebutted. Yeah yeah, but yeah Twitter can actively resolve this. If they wanted.
... which is truth and which is "fake news"?
People have been arguing that issue for thousands of years.
Not really, no. The only people arguing the issue are people who want to be able to easily dismiss any events, statements, or facts that are in any way negative or damaging to them.
The Huffington Post is (generally) not "fake news", it's merely biased reporting combined with opinion. The Onion is "fake news".
I'm astounded.
Scientists observe. Mathematicians prove.
Scientists observe. Mathematicians describe. Nobody proves. Everybody believes.
In the end nothing is provable as all things that an individual "knows" are based on the assumption that the incoming data stream called reality is the truth.
People more attracted to Man Bites Dog stories.
More at 7
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
When I talk to folks about the fake news they get why they enjoy it and read it, I'm told by them, that every story is based on a little truth. They think that they still get the base story, while being amused at how they are reading the news. Over years when this is all one ingests, it breads cynical distaste in life. Normal articles are long and boring, talking to different people face to face is out, and you can now see the truth, which really is that there is a conspiracy in everything. For the most part, they believe that they have thought it through.
--
People are people so why should it be -- Depeche Mode
I think this is more a study in how good of a job the fake political news authors do when writing fake stories.
Note...
- Sensationalism sells
- Opposing views rally
- Critical and divisive viewpoints get attention
- Gossip will be gossip
The average real news story is just not that interesting - most of the time. I'm not saying it shouldn't be interesting or people shouldn't care more about some of the newsworthy headlines, the fact is that most people just can't be bothered to give the time or care to it.
Everyone knows that social venues (such as FB and Twatter) are full of people that want to share, are generally very opinionated and are ready to share the latest scoop with everyone they know.
So, the conclusion the data collected by this study is likely extremely accurate, however the conclusion of the study that the data proves the rate of spread of information depends on whether it is true or false is naive at best!
The rate of the spread of information has always and will always continue to be based on the following factors regardless of the platform(s) involved.
1. How interested is the audience in the topic & information
2. Is the audience readily able to actively participate in discussions of the topic
fake news reaches users up to 20 times faster than factual content
So how far will this story get?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
.. are mostly idiots in the first place. Twitter is the hall-of-mirrors of echo chambers - lots of twisty little tweets, all the same.
Organization? You must be joking..
This tells me more about to readers than it does about the platform where the content is published.
While wild conspiracy theories, lies and misinformation, it can be flashy and click-baity. Lies exploit our human nature to find outrageous claims to be fascinating.
The more outlandish the lie is, the more interesting it is. Truth is truth, and often it's just dull and boring. It's a lot harder to make truth flashy and bold.
Off the top of my head - if each Twitter user had a "reliability" reputation associated with their account that decreased on false retweeting and increased with "true" retweeting, and their ability to tweet frequency-limited by that reputation score, would that put a check to this problem?
Just another good reason I'm glad I haven't signed up for a Twitter account (or Facebook either).
Truth is likely to be reported independently by many sources, fabrications have only one.
Unless you figure out how to aggregate the many sources that are all reporting the same truthful story, you won't have a fair picture of how fast that is spreading.
And here we have a perfect example of fake news generation, albeit it somewhat at the meta level.
Why is it that all the allegations against Trump start with, "If true..."? And why is it that they occur so often?
And why is it that the MSN ignores what is actually proved: collusion between HRC and Russia, private servers, DNC stealing the election from Bernie, etc?
Sorry, pal. But the fake news is not Trump. It is the cool aid that you are guzzling gleefully down.
This is despite the FBI and Congress investigating Hillary's email server then dropping it due to lack of evidence then bringing it back up and talking about it again on cameras and then dropping it again due to lack of evidence but then it amazingly becomes "Proved" somehow because it "proves" what Trump has repeatedly accused of is actually Hillary's fault of which she has been accused of by only you? Also you might as well add the weight of circumstantial evidence that republicans tend to repeatedly accuse democrats of things they did and then get called on it, then either drop it and shut up or get nailed on it. Trump is headed for the latter with the Russia fiasco. Scream fake news all you want because you don't like it, It does in no way change the truth just because you don't like it. If the Manfort issue gets prosecuted and it leads to an impeachment, then that will be one hell of a piece of fake news! /SARCASM FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL!!
Journalist, have become lazy...instead of investigating stories before they blast them out, they just copy/paste if it fits their personal, or corporate interest. Twitter is why the USA was founded as a Constitutional republic, and not a democracy. A pure democracy is emotionally driven, whereas a Constitutional republic, allows for conscience thought before making a decision. Just look at the whole hands up don't shoot garbage. Twitter blasts out that a police officer shot a kid several times WHILE he was RUNNING AWAY with his hands up, and it spread like wildfire. After the TRUTH came along, that we found out not only was this young adult not running away, he was running TOWARDS the officer, after he had previously assaulted the officer, and, tried to remove his service weapon, after he previously assaulted a business owner. But, still today, there are many who believe the twitter version, even though it was false. Twitter, is for TWITS.
"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." Mark Twain
It has evidence to support a theory.
I could have saved MIT quite a bit of money. Of course truth doesn't do as well as fiction. It's boring.
Doesn't that mean it is false. I mean Scientist have proved Scientifically that everything reported and on Twitter is fake news. So when Scientist get this Scientific study published in social media, doesn't it follow that Science is fake news? But Science is never fake. Seems like some kind of logical conundrum. Maybe Twitter does not exist?
People who believe that CNN is accurate and Fox is fake, or vice versa, are just deluding yourself. You have no way of knowing what is actually going on in the world. The only thing you know is what you actually see and are aware of. It has always been this way. So called news is just a means of population control used by elites to control populations to make said elites lots and lots of money and get lots of power. I'm not complaining about this natural order to the world. Wars and civilations have risen and fallen through the delusion created by media. Just don't believe you have some kind of magical ability to know truth. Maybe North Korea is really the best Korea. Maybe It is western media that his Its population brainwashed. You have know way of knowing. Just believe what you see ahead of you and take every established fact reported everywhere with a huge grain of salt.
Depending on your work that point may be earlier or later than most but you WILL accept stuff. Be it what is in history book , social facts, math, physic, what a reporter is telling happens the other side of the world, or what the doctor tells you, some stuff you WILL accepet as fact either what expert tell you or plain where you are not located. Now truth to be told there is gradation, e.g. if you tell me alien landed i will request far more evidence than if you told me there is a bushfire in australia during the summer. But you cannot simply fact check everything. At some point trust will apply. The point you apply that trust is open. One rule of thumb for me is to not forward anything i did not fact check, but then again i read a LOT of article on sciences, economy so i am an outlier.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people
Actual people or Internet Research Agency bots? I believe the Russians have got this deception propagation and contention augmentation stuff down cold .
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
The Huffington Post is (generally) not "fake news", it's merely biased reporting combined with opinion. The Onion is "fake news".
That really depends on your definition of "fake news" for me, yes Huffington Post is "fake news" and The Onion is "satire".
WBBSE 10TH RESULT 2018,
http://alljob.ml/wbbse-10th-result-2018/
There are earlier instances see Quote Investigator
Anyone who utters the phrase "fake news" instantly loses all credibility to me. If you can't explain what's wrong with it, then there's about a 95% chance you're full of shit.
Tell me what they did wrong, and I'll listen. Loosened the bounds of what's significant? Threw out too many outliers? Let participants self-select with no controls? Sure. That's bullshit.
"FAKE NEWS!!!", "I know you are but what am I?", and "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" are not productive ways to communicate.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
And, courage, can't forget the courage.
Courage and disruption.
You Silicon Valley types are such stable geniuses.
https://archive.org/details/Ho...
DPRK News Service is the only REAL news!
https://twitter.com/DPRK_News
No one talks about all the money the Chinese spent trying to get Clinton elected.
The Fifty Cent Army is out in force tonight. All these lame quotes about lies spreading faster than truth, from rarely seen accounts with shitty usernames.
Ivan, Comrade Wang, Agent Smith, or minions of the NGO - who knows. But shit man, it's so lame it's almost cool.
I don't know, "fake news!" is more concise than "That article is an utter fabrication with no truth to it whatsoever."
The real problem is credibility; people who cry "fake news" usually mean "Uh, it makes me look bad, and I don't want to admit it".