Many studies have shown that fake news has spread much faster and to more people than real news via social media, such as Twitter.
70% of false news is more likely to spread on Twitter than real news, according to a recent US scientific study.
People are more likely to share fake news 6 times faster than real news.
While the truth rarely spreads to more than 1,000 people, fake news has the potential to affect many more than that. In fact, the top 1% of websites spreads such news to up to 100,000 people.
A research team, under the leadership of Dr. Sorush of MIT’s Media Lab, studied retweeting and its effects on people’s decisions about what type of information they’ll share. The researchers published their findings in a paper in Science journal and found that true information diffuses more easily than false information through the use of social media.
They analyzed 126,000 written stories in total. Three million people forwarded it by retweeting over 4.5 million times. These stories were divided into true and false. Then there was a comparison between them for the likelihood of a story replicating via Twitter.
Fake news and false information spreads incredibly fast on Twitter. False information reaches further, faster and deeper than the truth.
Most of false news are often perceived as more original and emotionally charged. This in turn leads to feelings like fear, disgust, shock, etc. with true news being more expected and dull. People are more likely to be convinced by “original” content posted on social media.
Fake news about divisive political stories spread around three times faster than other kinds of fake news.
In addition, the researchers also mentioned that misinformation doesn’t just affect politics but also other aspects of life. This can range from public health by boosting anti-vaccine arguments to the stock market.
Most people didn’t realize this fact – fake news often spreads without any kind of effort, usually by people with a smaller number of followers. These users are highly inactive on Twitter and they rarely posted anything themselves. Though they do spread misinformation effectively .
Professor Filippo Mencher of Indiana University’s School of Information and Computer Science said: “We want to get the message across that fake news is a real problem, a difficult problem, and a problem that requires serious research to solve.”
Gather more information. Read MIT’s article on the matter by following the link, https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
