Scientists: Fake news travels faster than truth

It is said that a lie will travel halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling on its boots – and scientists have now proved this is true.

The adage, variously attributed to Mark Twain and Charles Haddon Spurgeons, a 19th-century London preacher, was coined way before the advent of social networks and 24-hour rolling news on television and radio.

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that false stories spread more rapidly on Twitter and reach a much wider audience.

Experts called the finding ‘‘very scary’’.

Analysis of online stories found that fake news was 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted and that true stories took six times longer to reach people. Deb Roy, Twitter’s chief media scientist from 2013 to 2017 and now an associate professor at MIT, said the team was ‘‘somewhere between surprised and stunned’’ by the findings.

The study was inspired after Dr Soroush Vosoughi, of MIT, saw tweets claiming that an 8-year-old girl who ran the Boston Marathon in 2013, and who had been running in memory of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, was among those killed when two bombs exploded. It was false – children are not allowed to take part.

‘‘I realised a good chunk of what I read on social media was rumours,’’ he said. ‘‘It was false news.’’

The team tracked 126,000 Twitter cascades of real and fake stories involving politics, urban legends, business, terrorism, science, entertainment and natural disasters. Professor Sinan Aral, of MIT, said: ‘‘We found that falsehoods diffuse significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories.’’ – Telegraph Group

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