Rumors Increase Retweets

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. doi:10.1126/science.aap9559

In this article, the authors examined the role of social technologies in information sharing and large-scale information cascades through a case study of Twitter. The authors analyzed approximately 126,000 stories tweeted by approximately 3 million people more than 4.5 million times, to determine the diffusion and prevalence of true, false, and mixed news stories as distributed on Twitter from 2006–2017. The authors verified the news items via six fact-checking organizations. The authors found that false news stories were spread “father, faster, deeper, and more broadly” (p. 359) than true stories in all information categories, with the effects most pronounced in politics. Moreover, when rumors are retweeted, “the depth, size, maximum breadth, and structural virality of the cascade increase” (p. 359). Notably, “the total number of false rumors peaked at the end of both 2013 and 2015 and again at the end of 2016, corresponding to the last U.S. presidential election” (p. 359). The authors also examined the spread of news by humans versus robots, findings that false news diffuses more due to the fact that humans are more likely to spread it. Given this finding, the authors recommended that misinformation containment policies not only look at the role of bots but also utilize behavioral interventions.

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