False news reached more people than truth on Twitter, driven by human sharing.

Evidence

It turns out that we can empirically evaluate this prediction on social media. … The researchers were then able to look at the dissemination or ‘diffusion’ process of true and false news on Twitter. For each rumour cascade, they looked at depth (the number of unique retweets), size (the total number of users involved in the cascade over time), and breadth (the maximum number of users in a cascade at any given depth). The results were shocking. … Falsehoods diffused significantly faster, deeper, and more broadly than true claims in all categories of information, meaning false news reached far more people than true news. (For example, true claims rarely diffused to more than 1,000 individuals, whereas the top 1 per cent of false claims frequently diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people.) … In total, falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than true claims. This was particularly the case for political fake news, which proved most popular as a category (compared to other news, such as finance or natural disasters) and peaked around the time of the 2016 US presidential election. Using a bot detection algorithm, the MIT researchers also reran the analyses excluding cascades started by bots (automated accounts). Importantly, the results remained the same, suggesting that humans (not bots) are more likely to spread the misinformation ‘virus’. An analysis of the text used in the tweets suggested that falsehoods tend to diffuse faster because they appear more ‘novel’ and often inspire negative emotions such as fear. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 346

Categorization

• XREF: The 2018 MIT ‘falsehood flies’ study is the canonical empirical anchor; the finding that false news spreads via branching peer-to-peer diffusion and evokes negative emotions connects to ch.5 on what makes conspiracy content engaging. — connects to: Misinformation often wins because it is simpler and more repeated than truth — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 87; Social media did not invent propaganda but reshaped information flow along three axes. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 313; Urgent threatening messages, group pressure, and shallow assessment drive fake-news sharing. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 325 (+6 more)
• SEED: The ‘novelty + fear’ account of viral falsehood offers an angle for a piece on why fake news captures attention as a design-affordance problem rather than only a reasoning failure.

Broader Connections

• Fake news outperformed reputable news in social media engagement in 2016 #corroborates (0.92) — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 18
• Urgent threatening messages, group pressure, and shallow assessment drive fake-news sharing. #corroborates (0.85) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 325
• False beliefs mostly persist through social transmission, not individual failings #expands (0.80) — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 30
• Social media amplifies rather than causes pre-existing biases in susceptible users #expands (0.78)
• Truth-seeking assumptions leave people unprepared for deliberate lying #complicates (0.78) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3144
• A believed higher end makes supporting falsehoods feel truthful to honest people #expands (0.75) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1391