Computer screens display the fake tweets that online users can generate at a Chinese website in Beijing. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

These insights emerge from a large and impressive study published on 9 March in the journal Science. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, interested in how and why true and false news stories spread differently, used 126,000 stories that had been tweeted by 3 million people a total of 4.5m times. The data spanned 2006, when Twitter began, to 2017.

The study is unsettling reading, especially in light of what has so far emerged from US intelligence agencies, congressional inquiries and the special prosecutor Robert Mueller about use of social media to distort the 2016 presidential election. I hope the research helps to persuade more people that fake news powered by social media is a serious threat to all democracies’ health. A growing bundle of studies shows that this is a qualitatively and quantitatively new problem, not just a digital manifestation of the yellow press of old. Apart from effects on elections and referendums, fake news in social media can assist hate speech to turn into communal violence more quickly. And some government responses are troubling on free-speech grounds, such as Sri Lanka’s week-long ban on social media, or “digital curfew”.

The MIT researchers studied what they called “rumour cascades”. A cascade starts with a Twitter user making an assertion about a topic – with words, images or links – and continues in an unbroken chain of retweets. The researchers analysed cascades about news stories that six fact-checking organisations agreed were true or agreed were false. The study found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than truth in all categories of information”. False political news reached more people faster and went deeper into their networks than any other category of false information.

The study compared the emotional content of replies to true and false rumours by using about 32,000 Twitter hashtags and a lexicon of about 140,000 English words that associate with eight basic emotions: anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy and disgust. Were automated processes, or “bots”, the main culprits in spreading falsity? No – the researchers found, it’s humans.

SOURCE: The Guardian