Three MIT researchers found that it took true news stories about six times longer to reach 1,500 people on Twitter than stories that were false.<\/b>
\nA trio of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have concluded that fake news travels at a markedly faster rate on Twitter than accurate information, in a wide-ranging study published Thursday in Science magazine.
\u00ab\u00a0I was very surprised by the results,\u00a0\u00bb Sinan Aral, who co-authored the study with Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy, told CNN. \u00ab\u00a0Not the result that false news travels faster than true news, but in the magnitude of the difference.\u00a0\u00bb
The study, which Aral said took about two years to complete, found that it took true news stories about six times longer to reach 1,500 people on Twitter than stories that were false. False stories, the study said, \u00ab\u00a0diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.\u00a0\u00bb
\u00ab\u00a0I find it disturbing,\u00a0\u00bb said Aral, who said he has been studying the impact of social media on society for more than 10 years. \u00ab\u00a0All of the potential consequences of our society being consumed by falsity. In terms of responses to terrorism, responses to national disasters, the impact on our national economy. I think the potential for negative consequences in those areas are very real.\u00a0\u00bb
The researchers examined thousands of stories disseminated on Twitter and trillions of tweets between the years 2006 and 2017. They relied on six fact-checking organizations to determine whether a story was true or false. While the researchers limited the study’s scope to Twitter, Aral said his \u00ab\u00a0strong intuition\u00a0\u00bb is that its findings extend to other forms of social media.
One particular category of false news that \u00ab\u00a0traveled deeper and more broadly\u00a0\u00bb than other types of stories, researchers said, was those about politics. The study showed that false politics stories were \u00ab\u00a0more viral than any other category of false information,\u00a0\u00bb reaching 20,000 people three times faster than the other types of information reached 10,000 people.
A surprising twist in the study was that bots spread fake news at the same rate as true news, suggesting, \u00ab\u00a0False news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.\u00a0\u00bb
\u00ab\u00a0This was one of the two surprising findings,\u00a0\u00bb Aral said, noting the other unexpected finding was the sheer speed in which false news stories spread faster than true news stories.
That said, the study did find that the types of individuals spreading fake news were not high-profile Twitter users. The research said these people had less followers and were verified by Twitter \u00ab\u00a0significantly less\u00a0\u00bb than those sharing accurate information.
Aral told CNN that this all points to the fact that \u00ab\u00a0behavioral interventions\u00a0\u00bb might be part of the solution to combating fake news. He said labeling news sources, similar to how food is accompanied by a nutrition label that explains how it is made and what is in it, might \u00ab\u00a0reduce the spread of fake news online.\u00a0\u00bb He also said removing the economic incentive of publishing fake news by weeding them out using algorithms, as Facebook has started to do, could be helpful.
Whatever the solution, the researchers noted it’s imperative the problem be solved.
\u00ab\u00a0Understanding how false news spreads is the first step toward containing it,\u00a0\u00bb the three researchers wrote in their report. \u00ab\u00a0We hope our work inspires more large-scale research into the causes and consequences of the spread of false news as well as its potential cures.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

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