Fake news spreads almost at the speed of light to put it mildly. This is what happens on Twitter, according to the results of a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published in the journal Science. The researchers analyzed the spread of true and false news through Twitter between 2006 and 2007. The data analyzed included about 126 stories tweeted by 3 million people over 4,5 million times. The results showed that fake news spread significantly farther, faster, deeper and more widely than real news. Overall, fake news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real news. True stories hardly spread to more than a thousand people. While the fake ones have also spread to up to 100 thousand people. Among the most popular fake news, the political ones were the most popular with an incidence of diffusion that is triple compared to other fake news. One of the reasons for this ability to spread fake news lies in their characteristics of being new and compelling. According to the researchers, fake news that circulates fast is considered newer. And new news is more likely to be retweeted. Furthermore, the most popular fake news tend to inspire fear, disgust and surprise, while real news tends to inspire sadness, joy and trust. Finally, when the authors used an algorithm to eliminate “bots” from their analysis, programs created specifically to design fake news, the results suggest that social media users play a decisive role in the spread of fake news.
