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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People taught lesson to those who were talking about changing Constitution: Pawar
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Maharashtra) (PTI): NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar on Friday said the country taught a lesson to those who were talking about changing the Constitution.
He was speaking at the unveiling of the Urdu translation of English book "Padmavibhushan Sharad Pawar - The great Enigma" by Sheshrao Chavan here.
The political situation in the country should change, Pawar said, adding, "We should think where we are heading. We have to see that the country does not fall in the wrong hands."
Four months ago (during the Lok Sabha election campaign), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party colleagues made statements that were not in national interest, the NCP (SP) chief said, referring to BJP leader Ananthkumar Hegde's controversial remark that they needed 400-plus seats to amend the Constitution.
"It is a good thing that the people taught a lesson to those who talked about changing the Constitution," Pawar said.
He also hit back at Union minister Amit Shah who recently called him "ringleader of corrupt people".
"A week ago, Amit Shah said that Sharad Pawar is the ringleader of all the corrupt people in the country. Earlier, when he was in Gujarat, he used the law in the wrong manner. For that the Supreme Court externed him from Gujarat. The one who was externed by the Supreme Court is holding charge of the Union Home Ministry now," Pawar said.
Shah was discharged in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case in 2014.
