Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News for Students
The truth about online fake news is becoming clearer. A new study shows that on Twitter, phony stories reach more people than truthful ones do. Fake stories also spread far faster.
Fake news refers to stories based on false or misinterpreted information. These stories try to dupe readers into believing something that isn’t true. Some might try to make public figures look bad or claim people did something they didn’t. Others might try to discredit scientific findings. Such stories are often shared on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. But scientists have lacked data on how widely they were shared, or by whom. So a team of researchers decided to investigate.
They recently analyzed more than 4.5 million tweets and retweets. All had been posted between 2006 and 2017. And their disturbing finding: Fake news spreads faster and further on Twitter than true stories do.
Filippo Menczer studies informatics and computer science at Indiana University in Bloomington. He was not part of the new study but says its findings are important for understanding the spread of fake news. Before this, he notes, most investigations used a few people’s observations rather than a mountain of scientific data. Until now, he says, “We didn’t have a really large-scale, systematic study evaluating the spread of misinformation.”
Deb Roy, who did work on the new analysis, studies media and social networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In the past, he also has worked as a media scientist for Twitter. To study how news spreads on Twitter, Roy and his colleagues collected tweet cascades. These are groups of messages composed of one original tweet and all retweets of that initial post. They examined about 126,000 cascades centered on any of about 2,400 news stories. Each of those original news stories had been independently confirmed as true or false.
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