Study: Fake News Spreads Faster Than Real News on Twitter

A new study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that fake news stories spread much faster on Twitter than real news—and humans are to blame for their circulation, not bots. “I find it disturbing,” Sinan Aral, who co-authored the study, told CNN. The study, which Aral conducted along with researchers Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy, was published by Science magazine Thursday and relied on 12 years of Twitter data. The main takeaway was that fake news stories “diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” Aral said. True news stories took about six times longer to reach 1,500 people on Twitter than hoax stories, according to the study. The researchers initially thought bots might be to blame for the rapid spread of fake news, but they quickly found that even with bots removed from their analysis, hoaxes still spread at the same rate. They have called for more “large-scale research” into the propagation of fake news in order to come up with “potential cures.”