Truth or Lies? False tweets spread like wildfire, real news lags, study confirms

San Jose Mercury News (CA)

March 09--Call it the curse of the internet age: Lies spread farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth.

In the first detailed analysis of how misinformation travels through the Twittersphere, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false news is 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real news. And it takes the truth about six times as long as a falsehood to reach 1,500 people, they discovered.

Don't blame the bots. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we're the ones spreading all the bad stuff, according to the analysis. That's because falsehoods are usually more novel, and sometimes more outlandish, than the truth -- and we like to share what's new.

The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, analyzed about 126,000 stories tweeted by about 3 million people. San Francisco-based Twitter provided funding and access to the data.

Misinformation always has been our enemy, since before the days when hucksters sold so-called snake oil from their carts. But in this technological era, social media acts as a strong current that sweeps tall tales far and wide.

"The results were disturbing. For us, this is one of the most important issues facing social media today," said Sinan Aral of the Media Lab of MIT's Sloan School of Management, who conducted the research with Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy.

"We find false news travels far faster further than the truth in every category of information -- sometimes by an order of magnitude," he said. "This has very important effects on our society, our democracy, our politicians, our economy."

The recent indictment of 13 Russians in the operation of a "troll farm" that spread false information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election has focused the spotlight on the power of false news to influence public opinion, putting pressure on social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google to monitor their content.

"The fundamental problem we have today is we have a media we don't understand. Social media has completely changed the landscape of how people receive information, how we pass it on and how we interpret it," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of Sebastopol-based O'Reilly Media and the author of the book WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, in a recorded MIT interview. "Ad-based media chases the clicks ... It panders to sensationalism. We understand what cognitive buttons to push.

"There is a whole science in Silicon Valley of 'how do you manipulate people, how do you get them to do things they don't want to do?' " he said. "We have figured out how to hack people's brains for profit. Not just profit, but political ends."

The study was conceived by data scientist and lead author Vosoughi in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when an MIT security guard was killed and the campus was on lockdown. While social media networks were abuzz with frightening news, he was unable to assess what was real -- or not.

Although considerable attention has been paid to anecdotal analyses of the spread of false news by the media, there hadn't been a large empirical study of the phenomenon.

The MIT team analyzed the diffusion of verified true and false news stories via Twitter between 2006 and 2017. Initially, the team went to six different fact-checking organizations -- snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com and urbanlegendsabout.com -- and looked at every story that had been proven true or false.

Then they studied Twitter's database to see how people talked about these stories in their tweets and whether they retweeted them, creating what scientists call a "cascade" of clustered conversations. Each cascade was time-stamped to record its route from one person to the next, making it possible to measure the speed and distance traveled by each story.

Whereas the truth rarely spread to more than 1,000 people, the top 1 percent of false-news cascades routinely spread to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, they found.

"When you are unencumbered by reality, you can pretty much make up whatever you want," said Aral. "It is easy to be surprising and novel when you don't have to be factually accurate."

The study found that false political news was the most virulent, spreading at three times the rate of false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information. The total number of false rumors peaked at the end of both 2013 and 2015 and again at the end of 2016, corresponding to the last U.S. Presidential election, when hyper-partisan anxieties ran high.

A sampling from 2016-17: Was Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring at a pizza joint? Nope. Did Pope Francis endorse candidate Donald Trump? Nope. Did Clinton sell weapons to ISIS? She didn't. Former President Obama didn't ban the pledge of allegiance. President Trump didn't dispatch his personal plane to save 200 starving Marines.

And it's not just a right-wing thing. Plenty of conspiratorially-minded posts insist that the real story of the Trump administration is criminally nefarious: Is Trump about to be arrested? No.

Bots are a problem, but we're a bigger problem. The team found that bot-generated news, whether true or false, spread at the same rate. Humans, in contrast, inflame things.

After an attempt to contact Twitter, they did not immediately respond.

Meanwhile, Aral warned that the consequences of spreading lies can sometimes have dire consequences.

"It can lead to misallocation of resources during a terrorist attack. It can lead first responders to the wrong building in a natural disaster," he said. After a false tweet claimed that former President Barack Obama was injured in an explosion, garnering more that 4,000 retweets, the S&P 500 declined 0.9 percent -- enough to wipe out $130 billion in stock value in a matter of seconds.

"The problem runs deep," said Dr. David L. Katz, founder of True Health Initiative, which aims to replace fake health claims and fad diets with reliable and accurate information. "Cyberspace is the ultimate, ecumenical echo chamber. Everyone can shout into it, and every shout has the same chance to echo from the megaphones of the sympathetic."

So what should be done? O'Reilly said there are many possible solutions, including changing business models, educating people to detect lies or developing technology to detect stories that are far outside the norm.

"Early airplanes couldn't fly far. They crashed a lot. But they became much better; the same can happen here," he said. "It's going to be a real challenge, but we can get better at this."

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