False news travels far faster and ext-ends further than truth on social media, researchers have found, in the largest scientific study so far of the way stories spread online.
Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth — and true stories took six times longer on average to reach 1,500 people than falsehoods.
The study analysed 126,000 stories between 2006 and 2017, verified by six independent fact-checking organisations as either true or false news, which were tweeted 4.5m times by 3m people. The results are published in the journal Science.