There’s a story this week about fusion energy. Without getting into details, it suggests that high temperature superconductors have made sustained, greater-than-break-even fusion something that’s much more readily achievable at a smaller scale and lower price, meaning that fusion power might at last move off the drawing board and onto the grid. And it might do so at a reduced price point and greater pace when compared to previous predictions. That’s all true, and it sounds fantastic—if a little overly optimistic for those who have been watching the fusion dream maintain its twenty-years-away estimate for the last fifty years.
But here’s another story. These new fusion plants are going to be so small, and so cheap, that they’ll not only power your home, they’ll run your car. In a decade, the hydrogen in a few drops of water could power your electrical needs for weeks at a time. Think about that “arc reactor” on Iron Man’s chest, then think about something similar powering everything in your home. And … unlike the first story, this story is a complete lie. Unfortunately, based on some research from MIT, it turns out to be much easier to spread the second story, than the first.
We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.
People are much more likely to spread that “Hillary conducts satanic ritual” story than they are one about “Clinton Foundation helps millions in Africa.” And of course they are. True stories have to abide by the confines of … facts. Which not only have a well-known liberal bias, but place a cap on the creativity and unique nature of the story.
We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information.
The study found that bots were no more likely to spread false stories than humans, but then, humans are already much more likely to spread false stories.
To look at how stories spread, the MIT team looked at “rumor cascades” in which the spread of a story was marked by the depth of the spread. When someone retweets, copies, redirects, or otherwise passes along a story, it gains a depth of two. When someone passes along that story, now it’s three deep. And so on.
A significantly greater fraction of false cascades than true cascades exceeded a depth of 10, and the top 0.01% of false cascades diffused eight hops deeper into the Twittersphere than the truth, diffusing to depths greater than 19 hops from the origin tweet. Falsehood also reached far more people than the truth. Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people, the top 1% of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people.
Even when false stories didn’t go to a greater depth than a true story, they reached more people at every level. Politics was more vulnerable to this rapid spread of false stories than any other area of conversation. Not even “slender man” or similar urban legends got the penetration of false stories during the last election cycle.
False political news traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false information. False political news also diffused deeper more quickly and reached more than 20,000 people nearly three times faster than all other types of false news reached 10,000 people.
The fact that it’s much easier to plant a false story than it is to correct it has been know for centuries. But this study shows that even if lies and truth start on even ground … lies win. False stories, from “Hillary had all the answers to the quiz” to “the Parkland kids are crisis actors” traveled not just faster, but wider and deeper than any true story about either incident.
That’s why one of the major investments the Russians made in attacking the 2016 elections, and one of the most overlooked, was creating pop-up “news” sites that churned out purpose-made false stories. The Pope endorses Trump! Hillary sold weapons to ISIS! Donald Trump sent his own plane to rescue stranded Marines! All those stores spread to millions of Americans in the last weeks before the election. And they were all created exactly for that purpose.
We can suss out bots on Twitter. And maybe Facebook will stop selling political ads about the US election to foreign entities. Maybe. But putting enough chains around lies to give the truth a fighting chance … is going to be difficult.