Roy adds that the researchers were “somewhere between surprised and stunned” at the different trajectories of true and false news on Twitter.
“These findings shed new light on fundamental aspects of our online communication ecosystem,” says Deb Roy, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and director of the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), who is also a co-author of the study. “We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” says Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does - and by a substantial margin.
