New research finds that rumours and fake news spread more within social networks than true stories. The study, published in the journal Science observed 126,000 stories that were tweeted by 3 million people, more than 4.5 million times. The period of observation was for 11 years from 2006 to 2017. Using six independent fact-checking organizations, the researchers decided whether the stories that were retweeted were true or false. The top 1% of false news diffused to upto 100,000 people while true news only reached 1,000 people. Surprisingly, robots treated both true and false news equally and accelerated both at the same rate! This implies that the agility of fake news owes more to humans than robots.
