People on Twitter like passing on lies better than they like retweeting the truth


Untruthful news is 70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than true news, according to new research — and bots may not be to blame.

In a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers analyzed the spread of all the stories verified (as either true or false) by six fact-checking organizations from 2006 to 2017. The analysis shows that false political news spreads more quickly than any other kind, like news about natural disasters or terrorism, and predictably, it spikes during events like the 2012 and 2016 US presidential elections. (The researchers deliberately use the term “false news” because “fake news” is too politicized, they write.) Though the Twitter accounts that spread untruthful stories were likely to...

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via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2FB356n"

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