Science proves false news travels fast
That bad news travels fast has been known forever. In 1710, Jonathon Swift wrote, ‘‘Falsehood thrives but truth comes limping after it’’. In Swift’s day, news spread only as fast as a horse could trot between villages.
Today, the web and Twitter spread news instantly to every corner of the globe. But now, it’s official. False news travels faster, further, deeper and more broadly than true news.
In a comprehensive new study, Soroush Vosoughi and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysed 126,000 stories spread as tweets. All messages were tested on six factchecking websites and sorted into verifiable and unsubstantiated stories. Three million, mainly Americans, read these tweets between 2006 and 2017.
False news spread three times faster than accurate news, and was 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true stories. If a news story reached 1500 people on Twitter, it did so six times faster if it was a false story.
True stories were lucky to reach up to 1000 people, but false news reached 10,000 to 100,000 people. Vosoughi and his team found that in all categories of information, false news spreads further, faster, and reaches more people than honest news.
False political news travelled even deeper and further, and was more viral than any other category of falsehoods, especially during elections.
‘‘If it bleeds, it leads’’ is a common principle, in conventional newsrooms and on Twitter. Cognitive psychologists know that novel, shocking or alarming stimuli grab our attention more readily.
False and fake storytellers exploit this system by peppering their messages with novelty, shock, horror and scandal. They use language tailored to provoke surprise, disgust and incitements to moral outrage.
The MIT team finds that Twitter acts like an echo chamber for amplifying false news. Users look for stories that confirm their beliefs and prejudices, and ignore or dismiss dissenting, critical or contrary stories.
When the web was invented, it was generally supposed that it would promote wide democratic discourse. That hope has gone out the window. The web and Twitter are now awash with snake oil salesmen, conspiracy theorists, demagogues and messianic gurus. They can be anonymous, crazy, odd, hateful, abusive and the most loud-mouthed people on Earth.
Twitter serves to magnify their bizarre, twisted views and swamp honest news.
Because false news diffuses so widely and quickly, it attracts associated advertising revenue and pours money into the pockets of media moguls.
That’s in America, but what about New Zealand? We’re not so much in the line of fire here, mainly because of our small population and we are not governed by a demagogue who has made an art form of fake news. Media moguls can’t expect to make much by fooling a handful of New Zealanders.
Nevertheless NZ Twitterland is alive with false stories about vaccination, fluoride, 1080, phone towers, genetic engineering and New Zealand history.