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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.
Stands to reason why fake news spreads faster. It's designed to be more interesting, more controversial, and/or generally more appealing than the actual truth. Truth is often quite boring, after all.
It's like how virtual reality is more entertaining than actual reality.
See : The President of the United States.
A lie runs around the world before truth even has its boots on.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-washing-machine/
It's all just a game to them. They cherry pick which sites they choose to "investigate" and flag for spreading "fake news". They know it's satire, it's about getting sites deranked that aren't spreading the right message. Now they want their hands on the controls of who gets throttled on twitter.
How many times did we roll our eyes and think to ourselves âoemorons!â when someone we knew sent us an email regarding the US post office contemplating charging postage for email delivery? And how many times did we get that rediculous email asking us to foreward to everyone we knew because Micro$uck was tracking the email in order to make email more efficient?
I used to tell people that those were virusâ(TM). Not computer code virusâ(TM) but rather ones spread by infecting human hosts by compromising rational thought.
You'll want to do some fact checking yourself as the article does not support your position. What is true is that a wildlife resources agency officer was asked to leave an Outback Steakhouse because an individual customer at another table became panicked due to the presence of his gun. What is false is that he's a state trooper or local police officer AND that the Outback Steakhouse has a "gun free zone"-policy, they do not and they have apologized to the officer. You're perfectly justified in feeling that a wildlife resources agency officer is equivalent to a police officer and state trooper and that he was told that there was a "gun free zone"-policy is bad enough, regardless if there is such a policy or not. However as a matter of fact checking the two propositions are false. Thus as far as fact checking, the mixture rating.