The MIT study analyzed 126,000 fact-checked news rumours shared by 3 million users.

Evidence

The research team collected headlines from the databases of six prominent fact-checkers (such as Snopes) and matched them to the Twitter data, finding approximately 500,000 tweets that contained a link to one of the fact-checking websites. They included these tweets as well as all subsequent retweets. Each of these retweet cascades count as a ‘news rumour’ on Twitter – fact-checked as either true or false – for a total of 126,000 rumours tweeted by approximately 3 million people over 4.5 million times. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 344