Page 28 - aruba-today-20180310

A28 SCIENCE
Saturday 10 March 2018
Study finds false stories travel way faster than the truth

By SETH BORENSTEIN calling this bogus informa-
WASHINGTON (AP) — Twit- tion "false stories" does not
ter loves lies. A new study capture how malignant it
finds that false information is. She said it would "better
on the social media net- be called viral deception.
work travels six times faster VD. And treated as analo-
than the truth and reaches gous to venereal disease."
far more people. The researchers looked at
And you can't blame bots; obvious bots — automated
it's us, say the authors of the accounts — and took them
largest study of online mis- out. While the bots tweet-
information. ed false information at a
Researchers at the Massa- higher rate than humans, it
chusetts Institute of Tech- wasn't that much of a dif-
nology looked at more than ference, and even without
126,000 stories tweeted mil- bots, lies still spread faster
lions of times between 2006 and farther, Roy said.
and the end of 2016 — be- David Lazer, a political
fore Donald Trump took of- and computer scientist at
fice but during the combat- Northeastern University who
ive presidential campaign. wasn't part of the study but
They found that "fake news" wrote an accompanying
sped through Twitter "far- report, praised the MIT re-
ther, faster, deeper and This Oct. 26, 2016 file photo shows a Twitter sign outside of the company's headquarters in San search but said the scien-
more broadly than the truth Francisco. tists may have missed a lot
in all categories of infor- Associated Press of bots and cyborgs — sort
mation," according to the of in-between humans. His
study in Thursday's journal mation reached as many manipulation through bots author Sinan Aral, an MIT ongoing, not-yet-published
Science . as 24 generations, while and human-coordination, management professor. research has found that
"No matter how you slice true information maxed out misinformation campaigns Lead author Soroush Vo- about 80 percent of false
it, falsity wins out," said co- at a dozen. and increasingly divisive soughi, an MIT data sci- stories come from just one-
author Deb Roy, who runs Concern over bogus sto- echo chambers," tweeted entist, said the three false tenth of 1 percent of users.
MIT's Laboratory for Social ries online has escalated Twitter co-founder and stories that traveled the The researchers dug deep-
Machines and is a former in recent months because CEO Jack Dorsey. "We farthest and fastest were er to find out what kind of
chief media scientist at of evidence the Russians aren't proud of how people about a Muslim guard false information travels
Twitter. spread disinformation on have taken advantage of called a hero in the Paris faster and farther. False po-
Twitter funded the study social media during the our service, or our inability bombings of 2015; an Iraq litical stories — researchers
but had no say in the out- 2016 presidential cam- to address it fast enough." war veteran finishing as didn't separate conserva-
come, according to the re- paign to sow discord in the The MIT study took the runner-up to Caitlyn Jenner tive versus liberal — and
searchers. U.S. and damage Hillary 126,285 stories and for an ESPN courage award stuff that was surprising or
The scientists calculated Clinton. checked them against six ; and an episode of "The anger-provoking spread
that the average false sto- Social media companies independent fact-check- Simpsons" that had a story faster than other types of
ry takes about 10 hours to have experimented with ing sites — snopes.com, line in 2000 about a Trump lies, Aral said.
reach 1,500 Twitter users, using computer algorithms politifact.com, factcheck. presidency. (It was in 2015.) "Falsehood was signifi-
versus about 60 hours for and human fact-checkers org, truthorfiction.com, University of Pennsylvania cantly more novel than the
the truth. On average, false to try to weed out false hoax-slayer.com and ur- communications professor truth," Aral said. "It's easy to
information reaches 35 per- information and abuse banlegends.about.com— Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a be novel when you make
cent more people than online. Twitter earlier this to classify them as true, co-founder of factcheck. things up."
true news. month said it is seeking help false or mixed. Nearly two- org, had problems with the That fits perfectly with pre-
While true news stories al- from outside experts to bet- thirds were false, just under way the study looked at vious research on the psy-
most never got retweeted ter deal with the problem. one-fifth were true, and the true and false stories. The chology of fake informa-
to 1,000 people, the top 1 And Facebook this week rest were mixed. MIT team characterized tion, said Yale University's
percent of the false ones announced a partnership The six fact-checking web- a story's truth on a 1-to-5 Dan Kahan and Dartmouth
got to as many as 100,000 with The Associated Press sites agreed with each oth- scale, with 1 being com- College's Brendan Nyhan,
people. to identify and debunk er on classification at least pletely false. Factcheck. scientists who study the
And when the researchers false and misleading stories 95 percent of the time, plus org, Jamieson said, looks phenomenon.
looked at how stories cas- about the midterm elec- two outside researchers did more at context and does "The more strange and
cade — how they link from tions. some independent fact- not label something either more sensational the story
one person to another like "We have witnessed abuse, checking to make sure ev- true or false. sounds, the more likely they
a family tree — false infor- harassment, troll armies, erything was OK, said co- She also suggested that are going to retweet," Ka-
han said.
Nyhan and Lazer said that
while more fact-checking
and education of people
on how to tell fake from
real can be helpful, the
more effective solution will
have to come from the so-
cial media platforms them-
selves. Politifact traced a
version of it back to Jona-
than Swift in 1710.q