False news travels faster than truth on Twitter: Study
New York: False news on politics travels farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth on Twitter because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it, finds a study led by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholars.
Social media has created a boom in the spread of information, although little is known about how it has facilitated the spread of false information.
The researchers also settled on the term "false news" as their object of study, as distinct from the now ubiquitous term "fake news", which involves multiple broad meanings.
"Twitter became our main source of news," said Soroush Vosoughi, a postdoctoral student at the varsity.
But in the aftermath of the tragic events, "I realised that ... a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumours; it was false news", Vosoughi added.
To understand the mechanism detailed in the journal Science, the team analysed roughly 126,000 stories tweeted by three million people more than 4.5 million times.
Falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.
When it comes to Twitter's "cascades", or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts.
"We found that falsehood defuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude," explained Sinan Aral, Professor at the MIT.
"False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information," Aral added, explaining why people tend to share more false news.
It is because people can gain attention by being the first to share a previously unknown (but possibly false) information. Thus, "people who share novel information are seen as being in the know", Aral said.
Examining this "novelty hypothesis", the team found that "people respond to false news more with surprise and disgust", whereas true stories produced replies more generally characterised by sadness, anticipation, and trust.
The effects were more pronounced for false political news (45,000 tweets) than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information.
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French President Macron concludes Mumbai visit
Mumbai (PTI): French President Emmanuel Macron, along with First Lady Brigitte Macron, left Mumbai for New Delhi on Wednesday after concluding his engagements here, including bilateral talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
They were seen off at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport by Maharashtra Governor Acharya Devvrat, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy CM Eknath Shinde.
On Tuesday, Macron held discussions with Modi as part of efforts to further strengthen India-France strategic ties.
During the Mumbai visit, the French president and his wife also met some of India's top filmmakers and actors, and had an animated exchange with them about cinema, culture and collaboration.
President Macron is on an official visit to India from February 17 to 19 at the invitation of PM Modi to participate in the AI Impact Summit hosted by India in the national capital Delhi, besides the bilateral summit in Mumbai.
PM Modi will inaugurate the summit on February 19. As many as 20 heads of states, including French President Macron, will be present at the inaugural session, Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said.
