The Science of Fake News

As per Deborah Byrd of Earth Sky News

"A big and hopeful thing happened at the end of last week in the area of fake news. On March 9, 2018, the largest-yet study of fake news was published in Science. Accompanying it was a second article in Science, in which scientists called for:

… interdisciplinary research to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.

The large study is titled The Spread of True and False News Online. Soroush Vosoughi of MIT was its lead author, working with co-authors Deb Roy and Sinan Aral. All of these researchers work in MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines; that is, they’re trained to study and ultimately understand what most of us find unfathomable, the spread of information online. They found that:

Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed."

"Trolls Across America: Mapping the Most and Least Troll-Ridden Places in the U.S."

"Internet Rule #1: Never read the comments. People are not always their best selves there. To find out exactly how bad the bad behavior is, we partnered with Disqus, an online commenting platform (disclosure: WIRED.com uses it) to quantify the problem.

Co-founder Daniel Ha says toxic posts have been an issue from day one, and he sees it as a human problem, not a technological one: 'It’s never really going to go away.' The company analyzed 92 million comments over a 16-month period, written by almost 2 million authors on more than 7,000 forums that use the software. (So sites like Infowars and the Wirecutter are included, but Facebook and Twitter are not.) The numbers reveal everything from the trolliest time of day to the nastiest state in the union."