The Atlantic– Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.
A massive new MIT study, first published in Science, analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.