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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Telangana CM urges Amit Shah to increase sanctioned strength of IPS officers in state
Hyderabad (PTI): Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi on Wednesday night and urged him to increase the sanctioned strength of IPS officers to the state in view of its growing administrative and security needs.
The two leaders also discussed the recent surrender of several senior Maoist leaders before the Telangana Police and other issues.
"During the meeting, the two leaders discussed the issue of Maoist surrenders and their rehabilitation. The chief minister informed Shah that significant improvements in policing have taken place in Telangana over the past two years," an official release here said.
Highlighting that 591 Maoists have laid down their arms and joined the mainstream of society during this period, the chief minister said the state government was providing them compensation and rehabilitation assistance as per the rules.
He requested the Union home minister to extend financial support from the central government for development works in the backward regions of the state.
Reddy also urged Shah to increase the sanctioned strength of IPS officers to the state from 83 to 105 in line with the state's growing administrative and security needs, the statement said.
The first cadre review after the formation of Telangana was conducted in 2016, while the next review, due in 2021, was delayed and finally carried out in 2025. Even then, only seven additional IPS officers were allocated to the state, the chief minister informed Shah and requested that the third cadre review be conducted in 2026 as per the schedule.
Reddy explained that Telangana, like the rest of the country, is facing several modern challenges, including cybercrime, drug trafficking, white-collar crimes, and other emerging security threats.
He highlighted the reorganisation of the Hyderabad, Cyberabad, and Malkajgiri Police Commissionerates, the proposed formation of the Future City Commissionerate and the rapidly growing population in Hyderabad to underline the increasing administrative requirements of the state.
