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Many utopian claims were made for this power during the early days of the revolution. Broader participation, it was said, would produce better political exchanges. But a new study by scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in the journal Science, reveals the opposite: Individuals bear much of the blame for fake news. The study found that false rumors travel the Internet much more rapidly and widely than facts. These untruths get their velocity and reach not from celebrity influencers but from ordinary citizens sharing among their networks.
Evidently, we humans have a strong preference for novelty and sensationalism over scrupulous reality. Offline, this can be dismissed as a matter of individual taste, but juiced by technology, individual preferences converge into cataracts of lies that wash away bridges of common truth.
“Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” the MIT scientists concluded after examining more than 125,000 stories shared by more than 3 million Twitter users. The most viral lies, they found, involved “false political news.”
