The study investigated the differential diffusion of all the verified true and false news stories on Twitter during the period 2006-2017. The data comprised 1,26,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. The news was classified into true or false using information from six fact-checking organisations. It was found that false news diffused farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information and its effects were more were more pronounced for false political news. People were more likely to share false news due to its novelty. It was also found that robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spread rapidly not because humans but robots spread it.
- The study investigated the differential diffusion of all the verified, true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. It was found that falsehood diffused significantly more than the truth in all categories.
- False news was 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth as it was perceived to be more novel information than true news.
- Robots accelerated the spread of false and true news at the same rate, implying they're more likely to be responsible for its spread than humans.