Study: 'Fake News' Sped Through Twitter Six Times 'Farther, Faster' Than Truth

[DonViejo]

Source: Associated Press




By SETH BORENSTEIN | March 8, 2018 2:32 pm

WASHINGTON (AP) — Twitter loves lies. A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.

And you can’t blame bots; it’s us, say the authors of the largest study of online misinformation.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016 — before Donald Trump took office but during the combative presidential campaign. They found that “fake news” sped through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” according to the study in Thursday’s journal Science.

“No matter how you slice it, falsity wins out,” said co-author Deb Roy, who runs MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines and is a former chief media scientist at Twitter.





Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/study-fake-news-twitter-spreading-six-times-faster-than-truth

[poboy2]

1. Hence the name 'clickbait' -nt

[TrollBuster9090]

2. Hence the 'Mark Twain' Quote...

[Journeyman]

4. Yep. There is little new under the Sun . . .

[bigbrother05]

3. Targeting and clickbait, they found the people that would spread it

And it was reinforced by the Fake Media, i.e. Faux, Breitbart, etc.

The same reason that the Enquirer and the tabloids still sell.

[RandomAccess]

5. I don't know how you can dismiss the bots on this --

things spread because more people see them. Bots cause more people to see them so THEY can spread them too.

[BumRushDaShow]

7. Exactly.

The bots can retweet enough to make the lie a "trending" and click wow click and off it goes...

[hvn_nbr_2]

6. There's an obvious reason for that.

Wingnuts automatically believe, and re-tweet, anything that says something awful about someone they hate. So, to make up an example, if WingnutFeverDreams.com tweeted "Hillary ate the Lindbergh baby alive," a million nuts, trolls, and bots would immediately re-tweet it and every wingnut would "know" within minutes that Hillary ate the Lindbergh baby alive.

On the other hand, if someone on our side tweeted that Trump ate the Lindbergh baby alive, people on our side would immediately question whether it was even plausible, would note that the Lindbergh baby was actually found dead and uneaten 15 or 20 years before either Trump or Hillary was born.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. THIS