(March 9) Science today published the largest-ever longitudinal study of the spread of false news online. Three MIT researchers, Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy of the Media Lab and Sinan Aral of the Sloan School of Management, investigated all the true and false news stories verified by six independent fact checking organizations that were distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The researchers studied approximately 126K cascades on Twitter about contested news stories tweeted by 3 million people over 4.5M times. Until this study, few large-scale empirical investigations of the diffusion of false news or its social origins had existed.
The researchers found that false news travels farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth online in all categories. The effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the study found that false news spreads more quickly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it. Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth, even when controlling for the account age, activity level and number of followers and followees of the original tweeter, as well as whether the original tweeter was a verified user.
Prior to this study, scientific studies of the spread of false news were limited to case studies of the diffusion of single stories or analyses of small, ad hoc samples. The findings from this groundbreaking study include:
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Science