The spread of false stories was more pronounced for political news than for news in the other categories.The researchers also settled on the term “false news” as their object of study, as distinct from the now-ubiquitous term “fake news,” which involves multiple broad meanings.The bottom-line findings produce a basic question: Why do falsehoods spread more quickly than the truth, on Twitter? October 1, 2014 Find out by exploring MIT Connect. But in the aftermath of the tragic events, he adds, “I realized that … a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumors; it was false news.” Subsequently, Vosoughi and Roy — Vosoughi’s graduate advisor at the time — decided to pivot Vosoughi’s PhD focus to develop a model that could predict the veracity of rumors on Twitter.Subsequently, after consultation with Aral — another of Vosoughi’s graduate advisors, who has studied social networks extensively — the three researchers decided to try the approach used in the new study: objectively identifying news stories as true or false, and charting their Twitter trajectories.
Remus And on social networks, people can gain attention by being the first to share previously unknown (but possibly false) information. October 1, 2014 Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true storiesResearch project finds humans, not bots, are primarily responsible for spread of misleading information.More about MIT News at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 'Searchability': Making your online content easier to findTwo savvy MIT community members share tips for improving your content’s searchability.More about MIT News at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Twitter provided support for the research and granted the MIT team full access to its historical archives. Twitter is your go-to social media app and the source for what's happening in the world. The company Health at Scale uses machine learning to improve outcomes for individual patients. In his latest letter, President L. Rafael Reif highlights three areas of "crucial work" for the MIT community. 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.“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.“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. Best posts of the year on @MIT highlight our new humanoid robot, MIT women in engineering, an optics lesson for #TheDress, and more.Best of the year on @MIT include a robot cheetah, next-generation spacesuits, and Tetris tater tots.Networks that map strength of connections between languages predict global influence of their speakers.MIT launches Laboratory for Social Machines with major Twitter investmentProgram aims to develop collaborative technologies to tackle complex social problems.What are people at MIT doing on campus and around the world? But the scholars agree it is important to think about ways to limit the spread of misinformation, and they hope their result will encourage more research on the subject.On the first count, Aral notes, the recognition that humans, not bots, spread false news more quickly suggests a general approach to the problem.“Now behavioral interventions become even more important in our fight to stop the spread of false news,” Aral says. Twitter provided support for the research and granted the MIT team full access to its historical archives. Moreover, the scholars found, the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.The paper, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” is published today in The genesis of the study involves the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent casualties, which received massive attention on Twitter.“Twitter became our main source of news,” Vosoughi says.