Tweets untrue at any speed
lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain famously said, and now researchers have confirmed it. That’s in a massive new MIT study, just published in Science magazine, that looks at how over 100,000 big news stories, broadly defined, spread on Twitter between its launch in 2006 and 2017.
It found that stories with “fake news” — a term the authors say they avoided since it’s become "irredeemably polarized” even while, as one of them told the Times, “polarization has turned out to be a great business model” — circulated much more widely and quickly than real stories in every sphere, and especially in politics. And that people, not bots, were primarily responsible for spreading this stuff.
Naturally, news of the study promptly started going viral itself thanks to headlines and posts about it that may well be in your Facebook feed right now. Reporting on the millions of impressions a fake news story received turns out to be a great way to hype the power of fake news and ride its wave, by suggesting that these stories have had great real-world impact.
Maybe, but no one’s shown that impact. A less widely circulated study in January found that 10% of hardcore Trump supporters consumed 60% of all the fake news in 2016. There’s no indicator that many of them changed their minds or votes on the basis of that fake news, or that really anyone else did so after their crazy uncle shared that post about the Pope endorsing The Donald.
Ironically, it doesn’t appear Twain (or Winston Churchill or Thomas Jefferson) ever actually used that line about the speed of lies. Crackerjack quote investigator Garson O’Toole suggests that whoever did coin it may have taken inspiration from another great satirist, Jonathan Swift, who really did write that “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”
Swift — he of “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country” by eating them — had the master satirist’s gift of seeing things through to their final consequences.
For a few years, he edited a newspaper, The Examiner, and it was there in 1710 that he offered an “Essay upon the Art of Political Lying” that — as newspaper columns usually are — was soon forgotten, save for that one line.
The whole thing, though, is remarkable reading about 2018, written three centuries ahead of time. Here’s Swift on Trump and his most ardent supporters (as well as some of his most resistant foes), the ones who gorge on fake news about him:
“There is one essential Point wherein a Political Liar differs from others of the Faculty: That he ought to have but a short Memory, which is necessary according to the various Occasions he meets with every Hour, of differing from himself, and swearing to both Sides of a contradiction as he finds the Persons dispos’d, with whom he has to deal . . . He never yet consider’d whether any Proposition were True or False, but whether it were convenient for the present Minute or Company to confirm or deny it.”
Swift continues, anticipating our evangelical-approved President paying for the silence of his adult-actress mistresses and his see-through lies about that and much more:
“The only remedy is to suppose you have heard some inarticulate Sounds, without any Meaning at all. And besides, That will take off the Horror you might be apt to conceive at the Oaths wherewith he perpetually tags both ends every Proposition: Tho’ at the same time I think he cannot with any Justice be taxed for Perjury, when he invokes God and Christ, because he has often fairly given publick Notice to the World, that he believes in neither. “Some people may think that such an Accomplishment as this, can be of no great Use to the Owner or his Party, after it has been often Practis’d, and is become Notorious; but they are widely mistaken: Few Lies carry the Inventor’s Mark; and the most prostitute enemy to Truth may spread a thousand without being known for the Author. Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that ifa Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.”
You can’t say this is new, or that we weren't warned.