WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new study finds that false information on Twitter travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.
And you can't blame it on bots, the researchers say. It's humans who are spreading the bogus stories.
MIT researchers looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016. They found that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for the truth.
The study is in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
How false news spreads, gut microbes that help and harm, and the long-term effects of climate change on fisheries in our newest issue: http://t.co/67xEIj1HNEpic.twitter.com/YtikrXKwt2
— Science Magazine (@sciencemagazine) March 8, 2018