I don't suppose it's especially surprising, but apparently lies travel further and faster than the truth.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Twitter loves lies. A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.But if you tell enough lies, don't you end up lying to yourself ... which is already a habit that leaves the opiod epidemic in the shade? Actually, what worries me more than lying when contrasted with truth is the apparent blindness to the fact that lies are very seldom as creative and intricate and downright interesting as the truth.
And you can’t blame bots; it’s us, say the authors of the largest study of online misinformation.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016 — before Donald Trump took office but during the combative presidential campaign. They found that “fake news” sped through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” according to the study in Thursday’s journal Science .
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
ReplyDelete-Walt Kelly
I wonder about the conclusion that “Lies travel further and faster than the truth.”
ReplyDeleteThis is key, not the lying: “The more strange and more sensational the story sounds, the more likely they are going to retweet.”
Hasn’t this always been the case? Only the feeble minded believe gossip at its face.
Hasn’t weaving “interesting” stories been the province of fiction writers, marketers, editors, and political spin meisters?
Ah well, “there’s no fool like an old fool.” Spread it far and wide. No. “There’s no fool like a horny & lonely old fool.” No. “A well know old degenerate politician from Iowa is running a doggie porn service out of a pet store in New Hampshire.” Yeah that’s it!
Good Grief!!