Skip to content

Study finds false stories travel way faster than the truth

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
10939973_web1_180309-IFD-twitter-false
This Oct. 26, 2016 file photo shows a Twitter sign outside of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. A new study published Thursday, March 8, 2018, in the journal Science shows that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu), File

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — A new study finds that false information on Twitter travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.

And you can’t blame it on bots, the researchers say. It’s humans that are spreading the bogus stories.

MIT researchers looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016.

They found that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for true stories.