A tweet can wreak havoc with just a few characters. In the same way that the phrase “A lie may have traveled half the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” is often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill or Benjamin Franklin, a team of researchers at the MIT ( Institute of Technology of Technology). Massachusetts ) has been able to scientifically confirm that fake news spreads much faster than true or real news.
The Internet has certainly accelerated the speed at which stories can travel the world. So much for the lies, the truth and everything in between, the travel time is much faster now, but how do you know which one beats which?
MIT experts Sinan Aral, Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy, analyzed 126,000 stories posted on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, with more than 4.5 million tweets from about 3 million people. The team used assessments from six independent fact-checking organizations to rank the truth or falsehood of these stories, estimating that there are some 48 million bots on Twitter and 60 million on Facebook (bot: programs that mechanically replicate tweets). .
“ Falsehood spread significantly further, faster, deeper and more widely than the truth in all categories of information , and the effects were more pronounced for fake political news than for fake news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, captions urban or financial information “, clarify the authors to the journal Science.
Fake news is 70% more likely to be replicated
“While the truth is rarely spread to more than 1,000 people, the top 1% of the most viral fake news is routinely spread to between 1,000 and 100,000 people .” The funny thing is that these results were true even though the people who regularly spread false rumors had far fewer followers than those who mostly told the truth, something that could have reduced their power to promote ‘fake news’.
For what is this?
This difference is not because people really prefer lies or that we are aware that this is what we are promoting by retweeting false news. We can’t blame the bots either. While bots accelerated the spread of fake stories, the authors found that real stories received an equal boost from bots, suggesting that the problem lies primarily with human tweeters.
Consequently, the authors looked for differences in human responses to typical true and false stories to explain their observations. By observing the reactions to these stories, they found that the false ones inspired greater surprise and disgust, while the true ones were more likely to encounter a feeling of sadness, anticipation or confidence. The authors suspect that the novel value of fake news encourages its dissemination, but it also appears that anger motivates retweets much more than sadness when reading content.
Thus, for example, false rumors reached their peak at the time of the last US presidential election. The study found that every U.S. citizen was exposed to at least three fake news stories created by bots in the month leading up to the last presidential election.
Solution? Nothing technological. Educate human behavior.
Reference: S. Vosoughi el al., “The spread of true and false news online,” Science (2018). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi… 1126 / science.aap9559
D. Lazer at Northeastern University in Boston, MA el al., “The science of fake news,” Science (2018). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi… 1126 / science.aao2998
