Study finds that false news spreads faster than truth online, thanks to humans (not bots)

An MIT research team has published a paper in Science detailing their analysis of the virulence with which truth and falsehood spread on Twitter; they analyzed 126,000 stories tweeted by 3m people 4.5m times, characterizing the stories as true or false according to consensus among a pool of independent fact-checking organizations, and concluded 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." (more…)