Social media has taught us a lot about what people find engaging, how they share things, and why they share. Twitter is especially revealing given its quick and dirty nature. Now, a study published today in Science finds that false news (as opposed to fake news, a term that’s likely too complicated and loaded to use) spreads much more quickly than real news—and it seems to be humans, more than bots, who are responsible for the imbalance.
"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," said MIT study author Sinan Aral in a statement.
He had his team looked at sample of 126,000 “cascades” of news stories—or uninterrupted retweet chains—created by about 3 million people tweeting 4.5 million times over an 11-year period. They compared to spread of false vs. true news stories, which they determined using sites like snopes.org and factcheck.org.
The team found that the false stories went further, and faster, than true ones by several measures. They were 70% more likely to be retweeted, and they reached a cascade “depth” of 10 about 20 times faster than true ones. And while true stories never reached past a depth of 10, false stories spread to a depth of 19 (and they did this 10 times faster than true stories reached their maximum depth of 10). Looking at spread another way, it took true news stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 readers as false ones did.
Not surprisingly, political news had the most dramatic effect. “False political news traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false information,” the authors write in their paper. But it also applied to stories on urban legends, business, terrorism, science, entertainment, and natural disasters.
And when the team looked at who was responsible for this discrepancy, they found that humans were more likely to spread the false news than bots. This may not only come as a surprise, but it means that interventions will be more difficult and more complicated. "Now behavioral interventions become even more important in our fight to stop the spread of false news," Aral says. "Whereas if it were just bots, we would need a technological solution."
Additionally, different emotions were conjured up in the viewing of false vs. true news stories. The former was associated with fear, disgust, and surprise, whereas true stories triggered anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. All of this is to say that combating the problem won’t be so straightforward. When you’re dealing with human motivations and emotions, remedies aren’t particularly clear-cut.
People may spread false news for a number of reasons. One may be that the false ones are often splashier than the truth (although real news has been plenty bizarre in recent years), and perceived as more novel. "Novelty attracts human attention, contributes to productive decision-making, and encourages information sharing because novelty updates our understanding of the world,” the authors write. “When information is novel, it is not only surprising, but also more valuable, both from an information theoretic perspective (in that it provides the greatest aid to decision-making and from a social perspective (in that it conveys social status on one that is ‘in the know’ or has access to unique ‘inside’ information).”
In other words, people like to share what they think will make them look cool and/or knowledgeable. Ironically, spreading false news may help them achieve this sensation.
And as the authors point out, it’s not just trivial stories that go viral—the phenomenon has some significant consequences, like “misallocation of resources during terror attacks and natural disasters, the misalignment of business investments, and misinformed elections.” So understanding why false news is created, why people share it so rapidly, and what can be done to deal with it are the next, and daunting, tasks for researchers.
