Researching the spread of fake news and its impact

it's the rapid and pervasive spread of fake news online the largest ever study into the phenomenon examined more than a hundred and twenty six thousand news related claims on Twitter and it found some surprising results let's bring in technology reporter Matthew Braga for more on this so Matthew what's so significant about this particular research so this is a study coming out of MIT and a bit of key context here now they're independent researchers but the laboratory for social machines it's one of the labs involved in this study they do get funding from Twitter and that

relationship comes with something pretty significant which is access to Twitter's raw data this big archive of historical data every tweet that's ever sent called the firehose and here's what they found in Twitter's cascading web of influence a single retweet wields the power to spread both truth and lies the study out of MIT reveals fake news spreads significantly farther faster deeper and more broadly than the truth the researchers say the truth rarely spread beyond a thousand people whereas the most contentious fake news in their sample regularly spread between one thousand and a hundred thousand people alarming

but so are some of their other takeaways from the study first well it helps it's not just about popularity take out the most popular accounts and fake news is just as likely to spread as far and as fast by users who are less active have fewer followers and follow fewer people second novelty helps fake news spread as well new or surprising information is more likely to get shared same goes for information that helps people make decisions and makes people look like insiders or people in the know as one of the study's authors put it when

you're just making stuff up it's a lot easier to be novel and finally perhaps most surprising they found you can't blame it all on bots or automated accounts the study found BOTS did spread fake news but they spread the truth just as equally when the researchers removed them from their sample they found humans were still more likely to spread fake news than the truth concerns sir that twitter seems to be vastly under estimating the number of fake accounts BOTS pushing disinformation and it's not just Twitter Facebook and Google are also under mounting pressure to address

the influence of bots and other actors on the 2016 US election campaign but the bigger picture say researchers is more complicated than that BOTS don't act alone bots are created by people and people sometimes act like BOTS and vice versa and there's a lot more research to be done we need to be looking at the platform's themselves how their algorithms are designed what kind of content is being incentivized and we also need to think about the average citizen and what information they need to be able to make decisions about what information to trust or not

another key part of what the researchers told me is that they want more access to raw data like this it's the sort of thing that will make more studies like this possible a more in-depth analysis possible and not just for Twitter but also other platforms too like Facebook and Instagram okay interesting stuff Matthew Braga thanks very much thank you