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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).
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.
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If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
All need revenue, some have agendas.
Some? Everyone has an agenda, even if it's just to attract readers by telling them what they want to hear. I primarily use BBC News and CNN. Both have excellent records on the facts, but I'd have to be deluded to think I was reading something written without bias.
I follow two accounts on Twitter - Same guy. And occasionally, his Tweets are news.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If you use anyone as a "fact checker" you are probably hopelessly naive.
So, the only things you know as a fact are things that you have personally proven? Even then, how do you know your facts are facts and not something else that happened by coincidence?
Otherwise, everything you know is sourced from a fact-checker that has validated the data as factual.
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.
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