Fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than true stories

Turns out users love to share fake news on Twitters (Rex)

Fake news moves at six times the speed of true stories on Twitter, a new study has revealed.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reached this conclusion after analysing the spread of more than 126,000 stories shared on the social network between 2006 and 2017.

They concluded that it takes true stories six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.

Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of the new paper detailing the findings, said: “We found that falsehood defuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude.”

He added: “False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information. People who share novel information are seen as being in the know.”

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Mr Aral and his colleagues presented their findings in a paper called The Spread of True and False News Online, which was published yesterday (Thursday) in Science journal.

They also found that fake news stories are 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are.

The stories involved in the study were retweeted 4.5 million times by three million accounts, with researchers then checking their veracity through six fact-checking organisations.

And it’s not bots that are to blame – Twitter users retweeting fake news are primarily responsible for spreading the false information.

“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,” said Soroush Vosoughi, one of the study’s co-authors.

Mr Aral added: “Now behavioural interventions become even more important in our fight to stop the spread of false news. Whereas if it were just bots, we would need a technological solution.”