False news 70% more likely to spread on Twitter- study
A new research study has shown that fake news spread more quickly and widely than truthful ones on Twitter. These are even distributed more by people than at automated 'bots' according to the researchers report in Thursday. A study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, researchers examining about 126,000 stories shared by some 3 million people on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 found that false news was about 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted by people than true news. The study, published in the journal Science, was one of the most comprehensive efforts to date to assess the dynamics behind how false news circulates on social media. Twitter and other social media companies such as Facebook have been under scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers and international regulators for doing too little to prevent the spread of false content. U.S. officials have accused Russia of using social media to try to sow discord in the U.S. and interfere in the 2016 U.S. president...