A large study by MIT, analyzing how news stories spread on Twitter finds that false news almost always reaches farther than the truth. The study claims, “a false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does.” The reason falsehoods spread faster and deeper on Twitter compared to accurate stories cannot be blamed on bots or algorithms says scientists at MIT but is largely due to human nature. The MIT team has two hypotheses as to why false news do so well. They say, “First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news” and “second, fake news evokes much more emotion that the average tweet.” This shows how fake news pulls readers in by using strong diction which is an example the rhetorical device pathos or appeal to emotion.
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