prasad1
Active member
The rapidity with which falsity travels has been proverbial for centuries: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," wrote Swift in 1710. Yet empirical verification of this common wisdom has been scarce — to our chagrin these past few years as lies in seven-league boots outpace a hobbled truth on platforms seemingly bespoke for this lopsided race.
A comprehensive new study from MIT looks at a decade of tweets, and finds that not only is the truth slower to spread, but that the threat of bots and the natural network effects of social media are no excuse: we're doing it to ourselves.
The study, published today in Science, looked at the trajectories of more than 100,000 news stories, independently verified or proven false, as they spread (or failed to) on Twitter. The conclusion, as summarized in the abstract: "Falsehood diffused farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information."
What can we do about it?
If humans are responsible for the spread of false news, what hope do we have? Well, don't lose hope, this is an old problem and people have been dealing with it for centuries, as Swift showed us. Just maybe not on this scale.
"Putting millions — or, overall across platforms, billions of people in a position to play an active real time role in news distribution is new," said Roy. "There's a lot more science to be done to understand networked human behavior and how that intersects with communicating news and information.
"https://www.yahoo.com/tech/false-news-spreads-faster-truth-185919443.html
A comprehensive new study from MIT looks at a decade of tweets, and finds that not only is the truth slower to spread, but that the threat of bots and the natural network effects of social media are no excuse: we're doing it to ourselves.
The study, published today in Science, looked at the trajectories of more than 100,000 news stories, independently verified or proven false, as they spread (or failed to) on Twitter. The conclusion, as summarized in the abstract: "Falsehood diffused farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information."
What can we do about it?
If humans are responsible for the spread of false news, what hope do we have? Well, don't lose hope, this is an old problem and people have been dealing with it for centuries, as Swift showed us. Just maybe not on this scale.
"Putting millions — or, overall across platforms, billions of people in a position to play an active real time role in news distribution is new," said Roy. "There's a lot more science to be done to understand networked human behavior and how that intersects with communicating news and information.
"https://www.yahoo.com/tech/false-news-spreads-faster-truth-185919443.html
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