Paradoxically, fake news goes viral on social media much faster than true and verified information. A recent study by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy has demonstrated, which analyzed, between 2006 and 2017, around 126,000 news threads on Twitter, tweeted more than 4.5 million times by some 3 million people.
The results were disappointing. In the authors' words, the truth takes approximately six times longer than the lie to reach 1,500 people. In short, fake content spreads farther, faster, and deeper into conversation threads and waterfalls than real. As Thomas Shelby says, in one of the chapters of Peaky Blinders, "lies travel faster than the truth."
Among all the categories of hoaxes, those related to politics are the most widespread, above those related to terrorism, natural disasters, science, financial information, or urban legends.
The fact that fake news has a 70% higher probability of being retweeted may have to do, according to the study, with the fact that it is perceived as more novel than the real news. People tend to spread the novelty to a greater extent than the already known.
Finally, contrary to what is thought, the analysis showed that bots, Twitter's automatic profiles, accelerate false and factual news in the same proportion, which implies that we humans -and only us- are responsible for the proliferation of fake news.
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