The spread of true and false news online: Lies spread faster than the truth

science.sciencemag.org

24 points·spion··5 comments

Meh, of course lies spread faster than truth. You can design the lies for virality and transmission speed but the truth by definition is not designable.

"A lie will go 'round the world while the truth is pulling its boots on." -- C. H. Spurgeon, 1859

"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." -- Jonathan Swift, 1710

It doesn't even have to be designed. Conspiracy theorists share wacky conspiracy stories, while reasonable people who read reasonable stories just think, "Of course, that's obvious," and don't bother to spread those stories.

not only this. We are wired to believe there is something bad or dangerous to any story, it is a skill we developed through evolution to survive. Things are bad until there is hard proof it is good. That way we don't wander around and get eaten by lions.

How interesting. The title of the report itself is "false news".

It's not the "truth" or "falsity" of the news that affects the speed of the spread, but the novelty.

"We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information."

Of course more "novel/interesting/salacious/etc" news travels faster. That's why the authors of the study created a "novel" headline.

The only interesting part is that rather than bots/algorithms/etc, it's the humans primarily responsible for the spread of novel news.

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."

I bet the true news about 9/11 attacks spread just as fast as the Orson Welles false news about Martian invasion since they were both equally novel.

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