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.

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

[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.

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.”

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."

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.