It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame.<br />And the study explicitly avoided the term “fake news,” which, the authors write,<br />has become “irredeemably polarized in our current political and media climate.”<br />The stories were classified as true or false, using information from six independent<br />fact-checking organizations including Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.<br />True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people.<br />As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news.<br />The study’s authors also explored the emotions evoked by false and true stories.<br />And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.<br />The study’s authors tracked 126,000 stories tweeted by roughly three million people more than 4.5 million times.<br />True news inspired more anticipation, sadness and joy, depending on the nature of the stories<br />And people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.<br />Applying standard text-analysis tools, they found that false claims were significantly<br />more novel than true ones — maybe not a surprise, since falsehoods are made up.<br />There have also been smaller studies examining how true and false news and rumors propagate across social networks.
