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Scientists Prove That Truth is No Match For Fiction on Twitter (theguardian.com) 194

Researchers find fake news reaches users up to 20 times faster than factual content -- and real users are more likely to spread it than bots. From a report: "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it," wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. Now a group of scientists say they have found evidence Swift was right -- at least when it comes to Twitter. In the paper, published in the journal Science, three MIT researchers describe an analysis of a vast amount of Twitter data: more than 125,000 stories, tweeted more than 4.5 million times in total, all categorised as being true or false by at least one of six independent fact-checking organisations. The findings make for unhappy reading. "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information," they write, "and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information."

How much further? "Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top 1% of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people," they write. In other words, true facts don't get retweeted, while too-good-to-be-true claims are viral gold. How much faster? "It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people, and 20 times as long as falsehood to reach a cascade depth of 10" -- meaning that it was retweeted 10 times sequentially (so, for example, B reads A's feed and retweets a tweet, and C then reads B's feed and retweets the same tweet, all the way to J).

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Scientists Prove That Truth is No Match For Fiction on Twitter

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  • Obligatory quote (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday March 08, 2018 @03:16PM (#56229169) Journal

    A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

    Attributed, in various forms, to many (including Churchill, erroneously) but there is no clear indication of who the original author is.

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/... [quoteinvestigator.com]

    • A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

      Sort of a twist on:

      "Dog bites man!": Not news . . . Won't spread.

      "Man bites dog!": Real news . . . Spreads fast!

      The real world and real news are boring and difficult for most folks to deal with.

      Fake news is fun and exciting!

    • by rnturn ( 11092 )
      The idea behind this quote has been around for a while. A variation on this quote is often attributed to Mark Twain.
    • A more mundane way of putting it is that it's easier to make up an interesting story, than it is to find a real one. If you control for how interesting a story is, I'll bet the fake one will be distributed in social media at the same rate as the true one.

      That is, this isn't an A->B correlation, where the (A) story being false causes (B) story to spread faster. It's a C->A and B correlation, where (C) a story being interesting both (B) spreads faster and (A) is more likely to be false. The story
  • snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.about.com
    • Translation: I don't have any actual proof that these sources are trustworthy, so I'll use scare quotes so I don't actually say anything that I can be called on.

      Unfortunately, that approach requires the people seeing it to be stupid. We aren't. We're quite familiar with how right wing nutjobs (of the type that increasingly infest Slashdot) work. You've gone right down the list of the sites they hate - because they routinely expose the right's lies and corruption. You can't disprove them on facts, so

      • Reality does have a well-known liberal bias. That's why the conservative coalition is primarily composed of Evangelicals, MBAs, racists, and libertarians. Those who live in a fantasy world, those who live and die by the lie, those who reject reality because it's a threat to their egos, and those who reject empirical economic data because it doesn't conform with their utopian fantasy.

        • This has always mystified me, and probably always will. How do you work with reality if you don't accept it? When your decisions are poor because they are based on fallacies, how do you hold tight to those fallacies and create new ones to explain away your poor decision, rather than accept them and make better decisions in the future?

          It's closely tied to voting against one's self interest. "It's more important that I identify with and support this group, even if it hurts me, than to be an independent agent.

      • Everyone who disagrees with my political opinions is stupid!

  • "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
  • There is real truth to the saying "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on".

    Falsehoods have always spread much faster than the truth, it's just in the hyper connected world we live in, instead of taking a day to spread through the world (slightly longer before the age of electronic communications like telephone and telegraph), it takes just milliseconds.

  • ...why did they publish their paper on Tweeter ?
  • The more it's believed.
  • I find it deeply ironic the the hive of SJW and villainy that are FB and Twitter single-highhandedly created right-wing ideological fever swamps.

    Before social media, it was mostly contained to a bunch of old senile people protesting with "Keep government hands off my medicare". Today, these cooks have a POTUS and SJWs gave them tools to do it.

    Hahahaha.
  • ... while the Truth looks for its sandals.

  • Truthy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Thursday March 08, 2018 @04:24PM (#56229627)
    It's just a sort of natural selection. The fake news which appeals to people's prejudices and desires is more appealing, and thus more likely to get forwarded. I'll bet there is tons of fake stuff which dies on the vine. Also, a lot of fake news is designed to specifically have that appeal, hence the term "clickbait." Meanwhile the truth is often quite prosaic, and doesn't often have that "zing" quality of proving us right all along.
  • by WinstonWolfIT ( 1550079 ) on Thursday March 08, 2018 @04:29PM (#56229665)

    Scientists observe. Mathematicians prove.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday March 08, 2018 @04:36PM (#56229719)

    And most people hate poetry.

    --The Big Short

  • I'm astounded.
  • When I talk to folks about the fake news they get why they enjoy it and read it, I'm told by them, that every story is based on a little truth. They think that they still get the base story, while being amused at how they are reading the news. Over years when this is all one ingests, it breads cynical distaste in life. Normal articles are long and boring, talking to different people face to face is out, and you can now see the truth, which really is that there is a conspiracy in everything. For the m

  • fake news reaches users up to 20 times faster than factual content

    So how far will this story get?

  • .. are mostly idiots in the first place. Twitter is the hall-of-mirrors of echo chambers - lots of twisty little tweets, all the same.

  • While wild conspiracy theories, lies and misinformation, it can be flashy and click-baity. Lies exploit our human nature to find outrageous claims to be fascinating.
      The more outlandish the lie is, the more interesting it is. Truth is truth, and often it's just dull and boring. It's a lot harder to make truth flashy and bold.

  • Off the top of my head - if each Twitter user had a "reliability" reputation associated with their account that decreased on false retweeting and increased with "true" retweeting, and their ability to tweet frequency-limited by that reputation score, would that put a check to this problem?
    • Off the top of my head - if each Twitter user had a "reliability" reputation associated with their account that decreased on false retweeting and increased with "true" retweeting, and their ability to tweet frequency-limited by that reputation score, would that put a check to this problem?

      If the assumption is that people who tweet are only reporting "news" then perhaps. Displaying reliability would be a possibility, but who judges that? If for instance, Fox News assigned it once, and CNN another, you would have wildly varying outcomes. On the other hand, displaying the reliability value would likely break Twitter's layout if Trump is in your news feed.

      Kidding aside, I like your idea, just not sure how it could be implemented.

  • Just another good reason I'm glad I haven't signed up for a Twitter account (or Facebook either).

  • Journalist, have become lazy...instead of investigating stories before they blast them out, they just copy/paste if it fits their personal, or corporate interest. Twitter is why the USA was founded as a Constitutional republic, and not a democracy. A pure democracy is emotionally driven, whereas a Constitutional republic, allows for conscience thought before making a decision. Just look at the whole hands up don't shoot garbage. Twitter blasts out that a police officer shot a kid several times WHILE he wa
  • "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." Mark Twain

  • the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people

    Actual people or Internet Research Agency bots? I believe the Russians have got this deception propagation and contention augmentation stuff down cold .

"Remember, extremism in the nondefense of moderation is not a virtue." -- Peter Neumann, about usenet

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