Lies Spread Faster And Farther Than The Truth On Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, lies travel much faster than the truth.
Researchers at MIT conducted the largest study of on-line misinformation ever.
They looked at 126,000 stories that were tweeted between 2006 and 20-16.
What they found is alarming.
A fake news story took only 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, about six times faster than a true story.

And bots aren’t to blame, because people apparently love to share false stories.

A true story rarely got more than 1-thousand re-tweets.
While the top 1-percent of fake news stories reached many as 100-thousand people.
It;s a problem Twitter’s co-founder says he never imagined.

“With an overwhelming amount of information available to all of us, the truth is out there so to speak,” says Evan Williams. “But the ability to spread misinformation is easier than ever.”

Even millennials are getting sick of social media.
A research group recently polled users between 18-and-24.
Half said they could use a break from social media and more than a third have already deleted their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts entirely.