Les fakenews se propagent plus vite et plus largement.

Une étude du Massachusset Institute of Technology examinant le flux d’histoires sur Twitter montre que les individus préfèrent les fausses nouvelles. En conséquence, les fausses nouvelles voyagent plus vite, plus loin et plus profondément à travers le réseau social que les vraies nouvelles.  Le fléau de la fausse nouvelle sur Internet n’était pas le seul résultat de zélateurs partisans ou de robots contrôlés par ordinateur ?

The researchers, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that those patterns applied to every subject they studied, not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science and technology. False claims were 70 percent more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter. True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people. And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.

Researchers identified more than 80,000 posts on Twitter that contained false claims and stories. Combined, those posts were retweeted millions of times.
 

Software robots can accelerate the spread of false stories. But the M.I.T. researchers, using software to identify and weed out bots, found that with or without the bots, the results were essentially the same. La suite sur le Site du New York Times