On Twitter, fake news spreads faster and further than real news — and bots aren't to blame
by Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
Mar 09, 2018
4 minutes
A new scientific analysis offers rigorous proof of something that social media acolytes have known for years: Twitter is an excellent platform for spreading actual news.
Unfortunately, the analysis shows, it's even better at spreading fake news.
Compared to tweets about claims that were verifiably true, tweets about claims that were undeniably false were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted in the Twitterverse. And false claims about politics spread further than any other category of news included in the analysis.
A team of data scientists and social media experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to these dispiriting conclusions after examining the
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