Fake news spreads faster on Twitter than the truth, according to a study spearheaded by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The study appeared in the journal Science and involved 126,000 stories tweeted on the social media platform between 2006 and 2017, ABC News reported. The tweets were from 3 million people and were tweeted or retweeted more than 4.5 million times.
False stories, as the researchers called them, were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones, and the top 1 percent of false stories were passed on between 1,000 and 100,000 times, while stories fact-checked to be true were typically retweeted less than 1,000 times, ABC News reported.
Researchers also used an algorithm to remove bots from the analysis and found that the bots affected the spread of true and false news equally, which means that the spread of false news was "a human phenomenon," the study showed.
"For me, the two most surprising results are the sheer magnitude of the difference between the spread of false news compared to true news," lead researcher and MIT professor Sinan Aral said, ABC News reported, "and the fact that bots could not explain that difference."
The researchers theorized that human nature is attracted to things that are new and different, and false news stories fit that profile perfectly, Science reported. The effect was most pronounced with political stories but was true across every topic.
Social scientists published an essay in the same issue of the magazine calling for more research into ways to reduce the spread of fake news, The Atlantic reported. "How can we create a news ecosystem . . . that values and promotes truth?" they asked.
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