According to researchers, fake news travels 6 times faster than truthful stories — and it’s people, not bots, that are to blame.

People are more likely to spread fake news

The seemingly never-ending saga about Russian meddling into 2016 presidential elections raised a lot of questions, including the one about bots and trolls. However, a recent research by American scientists says it’s people who are guilty of quick spread of false stories while bots distribute fake and true news equally.

Researcher Soroush Vosoughi from Cambridge noticed the impact of fake news during the aftermath of Boston marathon bombing, when he realized that a large part of Twitter references to the event was untrue. For instance, there was a student who was rumoured to be the culprit of the attack but was later found to be completely unrelated. The wrongfully accused student later committed suicide, ScienceMag reports.

This event was the reason for Vosoughi to put in the spotlight the spread of fake news on social media. “Rumors aren’t just fun things on Twitter, they really can have effects on people’s lives and hurt them really badly,” he explains.

Why misinformation travels faster

The group of researchers checked 12 years of data on Twitter from 2006 to 2018. The contents of the messages had been re-checked against 6 different platforms such as FactCheck and PolitFact. At the end, the scientists were looking at 126 thousand pieces of news stories that had been shared by 3 million people online.

Surprisingly, a truthful piece of news was lucky to be seen by 1,000 users. But false rumors could easily get to 10 thousand people via people’s reposts.

All types of fake news were spreading faster, especially the ones relating to politics.

“Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth,” EurekaAlert reported. “The amount of false news on Twitter is clearly increasing,” the authors conclude.

Bots are not to blame

Initially the team of scientists guessed that bots could be the culprits that pushed falsified reports. However, after eliminating the effect of reposts from the accounts of bots, the result was still the same. Untrue rumors were wilfully reposted by people who effectively set them viral.

Another hypothesis was that people who spread false stories might have more followers, but this had been proven wrong as well. The people spreading misinformation had fewer followers. They also in general were less active on the social networking site and used the platform for a shorter period of time. In other words, newbies were more prone to share shocking misinformation than experienced users. However, it didn’t prevent falsehoods from spreading; quite the opposite; it set it on fire.

Novelty piques curiosity, the shock makes people share

After looking at various aspects, the team could see the trend why untrue stories got reposted faster. They had some novel information in addition to already known facts. The news also got different emotional reactions from readers, who used emoticons of disgust and shock. These 2 factors paired together were the reasons for more retweets.

It was the shocking value of the novel piece of information that set the fakes viral.

“Crazy stupid” items, as Alex Kasprak from Snopes refers to this type of news, urged people to share more, setting them “massively viral”.

The problem with fake news

So, as the research by the team from Cambridge shows, people are much more likely to spread false rumors that are shocking and stupid. The researchers recommended companies like Twitter or Facebook to implement more safeguarding against purposefully distorted information in order to prevent it from being spread online.

The tech giants have taken the ideas on board. There are more ways to bring attention of moderators to potentially untrue narratives and remove them from circulation.

The world has realized just how vulnerable we are to captivating stories. Isn’t that what kept Scheherazade alive and what is helping the PPL industry to prosper? Check the facts before believing in a juicy or alluring piece of information. Telling stories is easier than providing true facts and being real.

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