Study finds false stories travel way faster than the truth

[Judi Lynn]

Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer
Updated 3:44 pm, Thursday, March 8, 2018

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.

More:
https://www.chron.com/business/technology/article/Study-finds-fake-info-travels-faster-than-truth-12738659.php

[BigmanPigman]

1. You don't need a study to find out that this has been

going on since the dawn of mass media, and probably since the invention of the wheel for that matter.

[SharonAnn]

2. "A lie travels halfway round the world before truth has its boots on."

[Judi Lynn]

3. Love that very old observation from Mark Twain. Painfully accurate, isn't it? n/t