A Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab study, which examined around 126,000 stories tweeted by about 3 million people more than 4.5 million times on the microblogging platform Twitter between 2006 and 2017, has found that the chances of false news being retweeted by people was about 70% more likely than true news. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information. As per the study, the top 1% of false news reached between 1000 and 100,000 people, as compared to true news which rarely reached more than 1000 people. In fact, true news about six times as long as false news to reach 1500 people. It's worth noting that bots on Twitter "accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate," which essentially means that the spread of false news is significantly greater than that of true news because of humans and not bots. Note that for the purpose of classifying news as true or false, the researchers used "information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95-98% agreement on the classifications." These fact-checking organizations are snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.about.com. The novelty factor It's worth noting that as per the study, one of the reasons why the likelihood of false news to be retweeted is 70% greater than true news is that false…
