You hear about fake news all the time, and the facts about fake news are stunning. It spreads faster than real news does.
That was just proven by a new study from MIT. Fake news is 70 percent more likely to be shared on Twitter than the truth. That fact does not surprise social media analyst Crystal Washington.
“We see that things that have not been researched very well are often passed on very well because they are sensationalized and people buy in to what they want to believe,” Washington explained.
And the researchers also found that when you take the 'bots' that post fake news out of the equation, the results are essentially the same.
“We automatically want to blame the bots, but the problem is us humans. We should do some research before we share these stories,” Washington stated.
True stories were rarely retweeted by more than a thousand people in this study. And it took real news stories six times longer to be shared by 1,500 people than fake news.