It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame.
And the study explicitly avoided the term “fake news,” which, the authors write,
has become “irredeemably polarized in our current political and media climate.”
The stories were classified as true or false, using information from six independent
fact-checking organizations including Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.
True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people.
As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news.
The study’s authors also explored the emotions evoked by false and true stories.
And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.
The study’s authors tracked 126,000 stories tweeted by roughly three million people more than 4.5 million times.
True news inspired more anticipation, sadness and joy, depending on the nature of the stories
And people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.
Applying standard text-analysis tools, they found that false claims were significantly
more novel than true ones — maybe not a surprise, since falsehoods are made up.
There have also been smaller studies examining how true and false news and rumors propagate across social networks.
