Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm pretty sure those 6 independent fact checking websites get their marching orders at the same time of day as the MSM.
Fake news continuously repeated and retweeted left and right..
Oh, you mean the TRUTH that the Jewish controlled media doesn't want you to know...
And CNN, MSNBC, et al. haven't trained their viewers too, for the bigots and falsifiers on the opposite side of the spectrum?
Even when CNN leaks debate questions to a presidential candidate? https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Or Don Lemon says mostly anyone can go out and buy and automatic weapons? http://www.politifact.com/pund...
When three "investigative journalists" from CNN lie so badly they resign over a false story about Scaramucci? http://www.latimes.com/busines...
Or when it deliberately writes a misleading headline to make Trump look uninformed: "Trump asks Japan to build cars in the U.S. It already does" by using a partial quote that deflects the reality of his statement: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/0...
Or when NBC doctors a 911 tape to make Zimmerman sound like he's explicitly following Martin just for being black when in truth he was asked by the operator to describe the person's race? https://www.theatlantic.com/en...
Confirmation bias is a two way street; it's amusing but not unexpected to see it at work on a person who, in an echo chamber of their own, believes it only exists on the other side.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.