Author: Michael Kan / Source: Entrepreneur
Brought to you by PCMag
Falsehoods spread faster on Twitter than real news, and the problem can’t be blamed on bots, a new study finds.
Fake news tends to have the real news beat in one area: novelty. That’s why Twitter users can’t help but share half-truths and unchecked rumors over the platform, according to a trio of MIT researchers.
The findings appear in the latest issue of Science and underscore an ongoing critique facing Twitter: that the social media service is doing more harm than good by becoming a hotbed for fake news and propaganda. The study delved deeper into the issue by examining how 126,000 stories — both real and false — were tweeted by over 3 million people.
“We found that falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” the authors wrote.
For instance, the true news-related tweets rarely reached over 1,000 people. In contrast, the top 1 percent of tweets carrying false news routinely spread from…
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