These three MIT scholars, Soroush Vosoughi, Sinan Aral, and Deb Roy, conducted a study showing how fake news traveled faster than truthful content, especially on the social media platform Twitter. Their study found that “False news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are.”
The one main question they focused on in their research was why fake news travels faster than material considered trustworthy? Sinan Aral states, “False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information.”
They found that people were quick to share news without knowing that it was factual because the individual posting the tweet would receive much-desired attention. By sharing the new upcoming publication, they would create buzz. The more outrageous the story, the more appalled and offended the reader would become; this begins a domino effect that allows each additional user the opportunity to generate more buzz.
It is noted that other social media pages such as Facebook are most likely experiencing the same phenomena and that mainly humans are the ones doing the spreading. If it were a bot issue, a technological adjustment would be made to ensure reliable publications were the main reports being spread.
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