8 March 2018 (Geneva, Switzerland) – False news spreads faster than true stories, and it’s because of humans, not bots, according to a new study published today in Science. Our preference for novel news, which is often false, may be driving our behavior, say researchers in the MIT report.
- Researchers looked at how roughly 2500 contested news stories – determined to be true or false by six fact-checking sites, including Politifact and Snopes – spread on Twitter between 2006 and 2017 via 3 million people and more than 4.5 million tweets. They found false stories – especially political ones – traveled faster, farther and deeper into the network than the true kind. (True stories took six times as long as false ones to reach 1500 people.) And, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.
- They examined users’ timelines over 60 days and found they were more likely to tweet information they haven’t heard before. And, this novel information was more likely to be false than true.
- They then went back and, using a bot detection algorithm, removed bots from the analysis. Surprisingly, MIT’s Soroush Vosoughi says, bots weren’t the reason for the difference between true and false news – they spread them equally.
- Most news traveling through Twitter isn’t contested so we don’t know what it looks like for news that didn’t make it into those fact-checking organizations, according to an author of the study, MIT’s Deb Roy.
- The researchers suspect the trend carries over to other platforms but they don’t have the data. Roy says:
“It raises interesting questions but provides no answers for what happens on other platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and other social media platforms but good old-fashioned things like email can also be used to share news. There are various places where news and information spread that we can’t say anything about.”
In an accompanying article, Nyhan and other researchers say it should be possible to tweak platforms’ business models to better balance quality information with the monetary incentive for attention. He says Twitter should be commended for making data available for this research and urges other platforms to follow suit.
