Study: False news on Twitter are spreading faster than the truth

False news got a lot of popularity during the Trump campaign. More precisely, I mean the period when the presidential election in America took place. They have a huge impact on the broad masses and the making of important political decisions. However, dealing with them is quite difficult. That's why different social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are making huge efforts to fight them and spread them.

It is interesting to mention that there are no analyzes of how many bots play a role in the spread of false news. This is exactly what inspired three scientists at MIT University to work on this topic. They published a study according to which false news spreads faster, deeper, more widespread in terms of actual information. The question arises - what is the real culprit in the whole situation? The three scientists point out people, not bots.

Namely, the study deals with over 126,000 stories that appeared in the period from 2007 to 2017, that is, from the foundation of the company until today. These stories were tweeted over 4.5 million times. The team found that the correct news manages to be seen by a maximum of 1,000 people. On the other hand, false news has a range between 1000 and 100,000 views.

This means that the false news is spreading faster, as opposed to the exact ones that require 6 times more time to reach up to 1,500 people. In addition, they are retweet more than the actual ones. Scientists have determined that it is becoming a true word for 70 percent more likely that a Twitter user would retaliate false, rather than real news.

However, much more remains to be done on the topic. Further research is needed to focus on this topic. Scientists suggest that the "freshness" of information is a possible criterion that would play an important role. In any case, the study is really interesting.

"Understanding how the false news spread is the first step in the fight with them," the authors of the scientific paper say. "We hope that our work will inspire more research into the cause-and-effect developments in order to find a potential solution to this problem"