Fake News 70% More Likely to be Retweeted

Fascinating research published by MIT researchers in the journal Science this week… After analyzing over 125,000 Twitter posts, they determined that false news travels farther, faster and more widely than truth. They classified news as true or false using six independent fact checkers, and tracked those with 95% or more agreement on classification. They found that “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.” And, humans spread false news at a higher rate than bots.

Read the abstract and find a link to the entire article.