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.
This is a Premium article available exclusively to our subscribers. To read 250+ such premium articles every
month
You have exhausted your free article limit.
Please support quality journalism.
You have exhausted your free article limit.
Please support quality journalism.
The Hindu operates by its editorial values to provide you quality journalism.
You have read {{data.cm.views}} out of {{data.cm.maxViews}} free articles.
This is your last free article.