Any platform that regularly amplifies engaging or provocative content runs the risk of amplifying fake news along with it. Though Vosoughi and his colleagues focus only on Twitter-the study was conducted using exclusive data that the company made available to MIT-their work has implications for Facebook, YouTube, and every major social network. The new study suggests that it will not be easy. “How can we create a news ecosystem … that values and promotes truth?” they ask. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.” “We must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century,” write a group of 16 political scientists and legal scholars in an essay also published Thursday in Science. The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. It might have something to do with human nature.” “It seems to be pretty clear that false information outperforms true information,” says Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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