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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Sexual Abuse case : Four more detained in connection with kidnap of woman in Karnataka
Bengaluru (PTI): The Special Investigation Team formed to probe the alleged sexual abuse cases against Hassan JD(S) MP Prajwal Revanna has detained four more people in connection with kidnapping a woman, sources in the SIT said on Thursday. The SIT has already arrested Prajwal's father and Holenarasipura MLA H D Revanna who is under judicial custody at the Parappana Agrahara Central Jail.
The 66-year-old Revanna is the son of former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda.
The four people were picked up to find out their role in the case, police said.
Revanna's aide Sathish Babanna was also arrested and is in police custody. Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara on Wednesday had said that a third person had been arrested, but declined to divulge their identity citing investigation procedures.
Revanna and Babanna were arrested first for allegedly kidnapping a woman, a mother of three, from her house and keeping her under illegal detention, police sources said.
The woman has been rescued, the sources added.
Police took the action against the 20-year-old son of the victim woman who charged that his mother had figured in the huge cache of explicit videos leaked recently of women who were allegedly raped and molested by Prajwal.
All the four are from Krishnaraja nagara in Mysuru.
