In 2018, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers went through 126,000 contested stories that were distributed on Twitter, some true and some untrue. They found that a false story was much more likely to go viral; fake news was six times faster to reach fifteen hundred people than something accurate. This was the case in every subject area—business, foreign affairs, science, and technology. “It seems to be pretty clear that false information outperforms true information,” Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist who led the study, told a reporter for The Atlantic.
