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SciShorts: Fake News on Twitter Spreads Faster Than The Truth

Concluding a study conducted at MIT, researchers found that fake news travels faster than the truth on Twitter. By collecting 12 years of data from Twitter, Soroush Vosoughi and his colleagues, were able to separate a set of 126,000 stories that were determined fake and were spread by humans. They were able to find that these stories spread faster than authentic news. Though the data scientists did not come up with an answer to this behaviour, they believe people were drawn to sharing unique stories that sparked emotions within them. Soroush has also managed to prove that the problem is not just created by bots as the news created by human beings also spread like wildfire. Whatever the case maybe, the amount of fake news in social media is increasing alarmingly and leads us to question of whether what we’re reading on social media is anywhere close to the truth.