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Fake News Spreads Faster Than True News On Twitter -- Thanks To People, Not Bots (sciencemag.org)
A new study shows that people are the prime culprits when it comes to the propagation of misinformation through social networks. Tweets containing falsehoods reach 1,500 people on Twitter six times faster than truthful tweets, the research reveals. Science Magazine reports: The lead author -- Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge -- and his colleagues collected 12 years of data from Twitter, starting from the social media platform's inception in 2006. Then they pulled out tweets related to news that had been investigated by six independent fact-checking organizations --
websites like PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org. They ended up with a data set of 126,000 news items that were shared 4.5 million times by 3 million people, which they then used to compare the spread of news that had been verified as true with the spread of stories shown to be false. They found that whereas the truth rarely reached more than 1000 Twitter users, the most pernicious false news stories routinely reached well over 10,000 people. False news propagated faster and wider for all forms of news -- but the problem was particularly evident for political news, the team reports today in Science. At first the researchers thought that bots might be responsible, so they used sophisticated bot-detection technology to remove social media shares generated by bots. But the results didn't change: False news still spread at roughly the same rate and to the same number of people. By default, that meant that human beings were responsible for the virality of false news.
Hillary bots aka shariablue spread more fakes affording to their examples.
Interesting.
So the Clinton Crime Family is projecting their own misdeeds when they cry "Russia bots."
Jonathan Swift had him beat by two hundred years or so:
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”
#DeleteChrome
Snopes is reliable for debunking urban legends, scams and email hoaxes. But when it comes to anything remotely political they lean so obviously far to the left it's obvious. They have been caught out time and again insisting their fact checking is accurate even when presented with facts clearly proving them to be in the wrong. Politifact is biased but will occasionally admit they are wrong, not Snopes, cite proof to them and they double down defending their falsehoods and equivocations.
Example this case: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/outback-steakhouse-gun-policy-controversy/
Snopes continues to try an draw some imaginary distinction between this POST certified Law Enforcement Officer and a police officer or state trooper. They all have the same certification requirements and like the State trooper this officer also has statewide law enforcement jurisdiction. He is a police officer, he was in uniform, yet they insist on trying to qualify that he is not a Local Police Officer or State Trooper, when his legal authority is the same and nobody reported him as a local police officer or state trooper. Just as a Uniformed Officer who was asked to leave because he was armed as required by his superiors and possibly the law.
This is just one example that comes to mind, I questioned them on it and they stuck to justifying the "Mixture" rating because of their imaginary distinction.
When it comes to politics Snopes is so biased they are a joke as a "Fact Checker".
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Also, real news is reported by a lot of sources-- people don't feel the need to spread "did you see what Trump just did" news when it's on all the news channels and headlines in all the newspapers,
Then why do they? Because they most assuredly do.
They most assuredly do what?
What the article showed is that fake news gets forwarded ten to a hundred times more than real news.
And then they add on top of it, with a lot unfounded Russian implications and other things that aren't real news.
Ah, I see. You're one of those "the Russian stuff is fake news!" guys.
No, "fake news" is a phrase that should be reserved for stuff that is actually completely made up-- like, "there's a pedophile ring operating underneath a pizza shop in New York that's frequented by celebrities and politicians", or 'Michele Bachmann said 'Jesus Created Assault Rifles'."
The fact that Russia did what they could to disrupt the U.S. elections (and for that matter, to foment dissent of any sort) is quite well documented-- it's not "fake news". Now, there's a lot of speculation that's been attached to that (a lot of "Mueller is investigating X!, and a lot of "who in the campaign knew, and what will we find out?") But the speculation is usually labelled speculation.
Everyone loves a good conspiracy. A good portion of the outrage stuff is fake (it exists on both sides); and some of it is real; the main stream media either prefers to highlight it, or to sweep it under the carpet, depending on whether it fits the narrative; while Buzzfeed and Salon are no more veracious than Breitbart.
The mainstream media for the most part labels speculation as speculation (and puts it on the opinion-editorial page). The way you can tell real journalism from fake journalism, by the way, is that real journalism issues corrections when they're wrong. https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s...
What's even more hilarious is that I can find multiple independent sources that prove you factually wrong on every single one of those links, even from right wing sites. Fake news has truly worked on you.