Think Before You Retweet: Why False News Cascades Faster Than True News on Twitter
“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude [on Twitter],” remarked Professor Sinan Aral of MIT Sloan School of Management regarding a research paper he recently co-authored on this subject. The research, conducted at MIT along with two other colleagues, revealed that false news cascades significantly faster than true news on twitter. In conducting their study, they traced the cascading of approximately 126,000 news stories on the social media site from the years 2006-2017. To distinguish false stories from true stories, they employed 6 fact checking platforms to assess each individual story. They found that “false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are,” it “takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories,” and “falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts.” (The researchers defined twitter cascades to be “unbroken retweet chains.”)
The question that they ultimately and naturally found themselves asking was: “Why do falsehoods spread more quickly than the truth, on Twitter?” The researchers hypothesized that the explanation for this may be psychological, in that people like novel things. Professor Aral further expounded that “false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information … people who share novel information are seen as being in the know.” Ultimately, we cannot draw conclusions about causation, but the researchers believe at the moment that this novelty plays a key role in the cascading of false news. There is still much further research to be done on this topic to reach definitive conclusion.
https://sap.mit.edu/news/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories