MIT: fake news Twitter six times more successful than real news

boston - Fake news spreads faster and reaches more people on Twitter than messages with factual information. This is the conclusion drawn by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who examined approximately 126,000 messages that were shared between 2006 and 2017 by some 3 million people.

The chance that fake news is retweeted by people on the message site is even 70 percent higher than with real news, according to the research published in Science. 'True stories take six times longer to reach 1500 people than incorrect stories,' according to a statement from MIT. This is possible because incorrect stories surprise people more quickly: the information is not in line with their expectations, said researcher Soroush Vosoughi.

The researchers checked whether stories were correct by using fact checkers such as Snopes and Politifact. In more than 95 percent of cases they agreed on the truthfulness of messages. It is striking that so-called bots, accounts that automatically circulate tweets, spread fake and real news equally.