A few year’s back, when Twitter was still Twitter and not a movie rating, a group of researchers decided to do a test.
They took a look at eleven years of the Twitter-verse, and discovered something that is both disturbing and has been known for a very, very long time: lies spread faster and farther than the truth.
18 years before this research was released (in 2018), Sir Terry Pratchett—aka STP or Sir Pterry to his fans—wrote in his book, aptly titled The Truth, that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
But attributing the quote to Sir Pterry would be inaccurate, because while he said it, it has been said in a variety of forms for centuries.
At various times its been attributed to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Charles Spurgeon (who himself called it an “old proverb”), Thomas Jefferson, Fisher Ames, Alexander Pope and Thomas Francklin. I’ve even seen someone attribute the idea to Gaius Julius Caesar in an attempt to attribute the quote, but as far as I can tell, that one is bunk.
Back to the research. The study— “The Spread of True and False News Online,”—was done by a trio of MIT scholars, who found that “falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude.”
That’s Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of the paper.
And, while it would be lovely to attribut the issue to disinformation bots, they found the biggest spread of misinformation? Was humans.
The researchers found that false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are.
And, when true stories grow to a significant number of spreaders, it took about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it did for false stories.
You remember that shampoo commercial where she told two friends, and they told two friends and so on? Well, false information would typically be retweeted in a chain at least ten people deep 20 times faster than facts.
Falsehoods? Were also retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.
To conduct the study, the researchers tracked roughly 126,000 cascades of news stories spreading on Twitter, which were cumulatively tweeted over 4.5 million times by about three million people, from the years 2006 to 2017.
The veracity of the stories was checked against six fact-checking websites: factcheck.org, hoax-slayer.com, politifact.com, snopes.com, truthorfiction.com, and urbanlegends.about.com. They all agreed more than 95 percent of the time.
Which leads to the obvious question: why? Why does false news spread more quickly than the truth?
The researchers suggest it might have to do with novelty. False news is just more interesting. It’s different and unique.
“False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,” says Aral. And, in the quest to be the first to share something new, the truth is set aside and timeliness is far more important. “People who share novel information are seen as being in the know,” says Aral.
That impulse to be the first to share a new bit of information is well known here in the newspaper business, or as some of you call it, “that seething cauldron of fetid garbage you call ‘unbiased reporting,’” (note that this is not a direct quote of anyone). Even here, where I only publish once every two weeks, I still feel … betrayed when local news—a new fossil discovery, a happening at the mine, etc.— is passed on to the CBC or to Energetic City or the Globe and Mail, and not to poor old us here at Tumbler RidgeLines.
But—and this is very important—we will not sacrifice accuracy for speed. There have been a few stories that we’ve been the first to publish, either in the paper or online, and boy howdy, does that cause the dopamine to flow, but we won’t rush good reporting. We won’t run with something simply because we saw it first.
And, you know, there is that whole “we publish every two weeks” thing, so speed is not the most important thing.
What do we prioritize instead? I’m glad you asked, totally-not-made-up-person.
We care about factualness. Sometimes people lie to us. Sometimes facts are presented as facts, and it turns out they are assumptions or mis-read or mis-remembered. We don’t promise to be perfect, because we are bags of flesh held together by skin clinging to bone structures that, despite all odds walk and talk and sing and dance reporting on other bags of flesh. Sometimes we will write about another fleshbag’s experience of the world. Sometimes—and I’m going to ditch the metaphor now—their experiences may not line up with actual events.
But we try to be as factual and as accurate as possible, considering we have a writing team of one (plus occasional articles submitted by others, which we highly encourage) and an editorial team of one, and we are the same person. (Lisa, who does ad sales, also proofreads the paper and will make some copy corrections, but her job is to sell ads and proofread. Factual errors are mine alone.)
We also try to be human driven. I don’t want to just know the facts, I want to know the people and the personalities involved. That doesn’t always happen (and this paper is one sadly lacking in human presence), but it’s something that we aspire to.
And while that might mean that we are read by fewer people than a rag that just spouts crap from a single point of view (coughdrutherscough), we pride ourselves in being relevant to at least the people who live here in town.
You are our readers. It’s our mission to make sure you know at least a little bit about what’s happening here.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
