The spread of true and false news online
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
This article investigates the spread of news, finding that humans tend to spread fake news at a much higher rate than real news. The main reasoning behind fake news spreading faster was ruled to be the novelty of the information. Fake news was extremely prevalent during the last US election. The authors take about rumor cascades, a type of information cascade, on Twitter. Rumor cascades spread when someone on Twitter made a claim which their followers then retweeted. They explain that rumor cascades can be multiple: if someone does not retweet the rumor, but rather simply repeats it by tweeting it themselves, they have effectively created a new cascade.
Their studies contradict what we would assume based on lecture. We would expect users who had more followings to have a greater impact in spreading false information due to their power in the network. However, it was found that those who spread fake news had less followers. It is interesting to consider why this is. The authors speculate that fake news spread faster despite this fact, not because of them; This makes sense when we consider what we have learned about information cascades.