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Fake News Spreads Faster Than True News On Twitter -- Thanks To People, Not Bots (sciencemag.org) 94

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.
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Fake News Spreads Faster Than True News On Twitter -- Thanks To People, Not Bots

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  • by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @02:07AM (#56232159)
    duplicate news seems to spread fasted on slashdot though !
  • by Anonymous Coward

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

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @09:31AM (#56233237) Homepage

      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.

  • by deek ( 22697 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @02:09AM (#56232163) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

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

      • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @08:09AM (#56232883)

        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: (Score:1, Troll)

          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... [washingtonpost.com]
          Or Don Lemon says mostly anyone can go out and buy and automatic weapons? http://www.politifact.com/pund... [politifact.com]
          When three "investigative journalists" from CNN lie so badly they resign over a false story about Scaramucci? http://www.latimes.com/busines... [latimes.com]
          Or when it deliberately writes a mi

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by 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.

            • But curiously, you haven't. Because you can't. And not a one of those links are right wing.
              You know what hasn't worked on me? Trolls like you trying to divide America and stir the pot.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 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.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Or put another way, there are more putzes than intelligent people and Twitter is representative of the proportions.

  • People are stupid. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    See : The President of the United States.

  • by chthon ( 580889 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @02:33AM (#56232189) Journal

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

  • by grungeman ( 590547 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @02:50AM (#56232221)
    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."
  • I don't tweet. Don't read social media.
  • So instead of all that cumbersome fact-checking, we can just measure the truth of a story on Twitter! And automate it! Then trolls would have to design purpousefully even slow-moving news to be believed. And we should trust only the medium-speed news. And then...

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Fake News spreads even fastr with network like CNN

  • by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Friday March 09, 2018 @07:31AM (#56232761)

    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.

  • I mean the point of fake news is to convince people. Not bots. The fake news peddlers need to make it go viral. And it's humans that do that.
  • Nobody creates a boring fake news story. Lots of real news is uninteresting. There's your difference. When it is believed, fake news travels faster because it is more interesting.

    • Nobody creates a boring fake news story. Lots of real news is uninteresting. There's your difference. When it is believed, fake news travels faster because it is more interesting.

      Not only is real news boring but their selection pool is horribly biased. Nobody takes the time to write a fact checking article for a boring true story. You only fact check something that is questionable in nature to begin with.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    No explicit mention of the role of the various algorithms that promote posts? There has recently been quite a bit of research into how the platform software promotes click friendly content. Click friendly content is exactly as the article describes and thus mainly lies and fabrication. So there's a double whammy where clicky content is promoted by humans and the platforms. The profit motive breeds more fake news at all levels.

  • I don't even look at Twitter, and I do not follow politics on Facebook. I do follow a lot of main mainstream media sites on Facebook. La Times, cbsnews, usatoday, washingtonpost. And even what political news I do see, I always look for other reliable sources to verify what I am reading is true. At least as the majority of different sources know.
  • "A lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots"

  • If you don't read news on your social media outlet, you are uninformed. However, if you do read your news on social media, you are misinformed.

  • This has got to be part of that "Future Shock" phenomena that Alvin Toffler wrote about in 1970.
    We are the proverbial monkeys with a machine gun.

    It still amazes me to see the vast proliferation of totally idiotic behavior by my fellow man.
    Including the tendency to believe what one wants to believe.
    I blame nearly all of it on Corporations and our puppet government.

    Think about it. The media, TV shows, commercials (one of the worst!), and a lack of government help in the area of REAL education for the g

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

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