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.

Comments

double the fun

[bugs2squash]

duplicate news seems to spread fasted on slashdot though !

Re:double the fun

[_Sharp'r_]

This story reminds me a lot of another discussion I read recently.

Re:double the fun

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Of course, repetition is the mother of learning.

Fake news is more interesting

[deek]

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.

Re:Fake news is more interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Corollary 1: The more widespread the news/rumor, the more likely it is to be false.

Corollary 2: If it's trending on Facebook or Twitter, then it's probably false.

Re:Fake news is more interesting

[mjwx]

The truth is not boring, its just that you never get to hear the interesting truths.

The old saying goes, "Truth is stranger than fiction" and that is quite true, but fiction is far more pleasing than the truth. So many prefer to live in a world of fiction. The problem is that many "news" agencies like the Daily Mail and Fox News have trained their reader/viewership to reject news that is based on facts and written in neutral (as in non-inflammatory) language as fake whilst accepting biased, opinion based news written to incite anger as true.

This is a case of people confirming their own bias.
1) Fake news organisation publishes fallacious and thought terminating cliche ridden piece about $thingYouDontLike.
2) Joe the biggot reads piece, shares on Twunter with the byline "Oh my Setekh, this is totally true about $thingIDontLike #PoliticianIDontLike #ThingIDontLike #LikeTotallyAndNotMadeUp #Selfie ".
3) Jane the slightly lesser biggot re-twunts it, then John the casually racist does the same and it eventually reaches Sally the well intentioned but not that bright who believes it because she doesn't question the facts presented when they're popular. Unfortunately there are a lot of people like Sally in the world.

It spreads because its written to be inflammatory and prevent us from thinking about the information critically, which is why it works well on those that aren't that bright however it's initially spread by people who simply want to confirm their own bias. Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites are perfect for this because their entire business model revolves around keeping you in an echo chamber so you don't want to leave. If Facebook really did crack down on fake news, users would leave in droves.

Re:Fake news is more interesting

[Wycliffe]

Or maybe there's an issue with their definition of "fake". The quoted selection of fact checkers alone suggest a heavy bias.

Or a fact checker at all regardless of bias. You don't typically need a fact checker for stuff that is not questionable to begin with. I would expect places like snopes, factcheck.org, mythbusters, etc... are heavily biased toward questionable and false claims. They would be boring sites if 90% of their articles were about "yes, that's true". It's the same reason the published research articles are heavily biased toward showing success or upsets. Research articles showing failures or "behaved as expected" or "nothing happened" are generally not very interesting.

Re:Fake news is more interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Terry Pratchett quote of the day

[chthon]

A lie runs around the world before truth even has its boots on.

Re:Terry Pratchett quote of the day

[93 Escort Wagon]

Jonathan Swift had him beat by two hundred years or so:

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”

Re:Terry Pratchett quote of the day

[shanen]

Wasn't that Samuel Clemens?

Bad news travel faster than light

[grungeman]

Quote from Douglas Adams' "Mostly Harmless":

"One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there."

Fashion trends in IT?

[shanen]

I agree that there is a lot of recycling of related themes these days, but I suspect the cause is staffing shortages or priority "issues" among the current editors of Slashdot. Paid staff or volunteers? Either way the financial model appears to be continuing to work poorly.

As regards this story, I think that credibility should be an important dimension of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), but credibility is a hard one to define clearly and uniformly, so I think it should probably be broken down into several other dimensions. However the obvious effect of propagating garbage should be a reduction in the EPR of the propagator. This should still be part of system that is biased in favor of good behaviors, but if someone thinks some identity is propagating lies or fake news, then the evidence should be presented. (Getting more wrinkled, but I actually think there should be an appeals mechanism,too. NOT modeled after the fiasco that is YouTube.)

By the way, this EPR approach would work especially well where a significant number of the identities have been verified. Not yet clear if that is where Twitter is heading, but Twitter has even more room for improvement than Slashdot.

This should not come as a surprise

[e3m4n]

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.

Re: Fact checking

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

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.

fake news it is crafted to outrage people

[XXongo]

Perhaps fake news is designed to excite people while real news isn't.

This is it precisely. Fake news is deliberately crafted to outrage people. Real news is messy-- it doesn't have all the details, and there is always some "well this side makes a point but the other side has a point, too."

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, but they do feel the need to spread the "here's something outrageous that isn't in the news but should be" stories that are not in the news because they are made up.

But overall, yes: fake news spreads faster because it is crafted to outrage people.

real and fake

[XXongo]

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...