To conduct the study, the researchers tracked roughly 126,000 cascades of news stories spreading on Twitter, which were cumulatively tweeted over 4.5 million times by about 3 million people, from the years 2006 to 2017. Roy served as Twitter’s chief media scientist from 2013 to 2017. Twitter provided support for the research and granted the MIT team full access to its historical archives. Subsequently, after consultation with Aral - another of Vosoughi’s graduate advisors, who has studied social networks extensively - the three researchers decided to try the approach used in the new study: objectively identifying news stories as true or false, and charting their Twitter trajectories. But in the aftermath of the tragic events, he adds, “I realized that … a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumors it was false news.” Subsequently, Vosoughi and Roy - Vosoughi’s graduate advisor at the time - decided to pivot Vosoughi’s PhD focus to develop a model that could predict the veracity of rumors on Twitter. “Twitter became our main source of news,” Vosoughi says. The genesis of the study involves the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent casualties, which received massive attention on Twitter. Why novelty may drive the spread of falsity The paper, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” is published today in Science. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. The study provides a variety of ways of quantifying this phenomenon: For instance, false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. “When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, differences between the spread of false and true news stood,”says Soroush Vosoughi, a co-author of the new paper and a postdoc at LSM whose PhD research helped give rise to the current study. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items. Moreover, the scholars found, the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Roy adds that the researchers were “somewhere between surprised and stunned” at the different trajectories of true and false news on Twitter. “These findings shed new light on fundamental aspects of our online communication ecosystem,” says Deb Roy, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and director of the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), who is also a co-author of the study. “We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” says Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does - and by a substantial margin.
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