In 2018 the journal Science published one of the largest studies ever made of how news spreads online. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral of MIT followed about 126,000 stories shared on Twitter by roughly three million people between 2006 and 2017. Each story had been checked by independent fact-checking organisations, so the researchers knew which were true and which were false.

The result was striking. False stories were about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. True stories took around six times longer to reach 1,500 people. Falsehood spread farther, faster, deeper and more broadly in every category they studied, and most strongly in political news.

It was not the bots

A common assumption is that automated accounts are to blame. The researchers tested this directly. When they removed bot activity from the data, the pattern stayed the same: bots spread true and false news at similar rates. The difference came from people.

Why people share falsehoods

The study offered a clue. False stories tended to be more novel: they told people something they had not heard before. They also triggered stronger reactions of surprise and disgust, while true stories more often produced anticipation, sadness or trust.

Novelty is socially valuable. Being the first to share something surprising makes us look informed. The problem is that reality is usually less surprising than invention. A made-up story can be designed for maximum shock; a true one has to live with the facts.

What this means for readers

  • Surprise is a warning sign, not proof. The more astonishing a claim, the more it deserves a pause.
  • Speed works against accuracy. Sharing within seconds favours the story built to be shared, not the one built to be true.
  • Your share is a signal. Each repost tells your contacts the story is worth their attention.

What this means for fact-checkers

If falsehood moves six times faster, fact-checking cannot rely only on long rebuttals published days later. It needs tools that let anyone check a claim at the moment they meet it. That is the purpose of the Claim to Evidence engine in Honest News: paste the sentence that surprised you, and see what the evidence says before you pass it on.

Source: Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.