That's when Vosoughi realized that 'these rumors aren't just fun things on Twitter, they really can have effects on people's lives and hurt them really badly.' A Ph.D. But later, people found out that he had nothing to do with the attack and had committed suicide (for reasons unrelated to the bombing). There were rumors that a student from Brown University, who had gone missing, was suspected by the police. The lead author-Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge-says after the attack a lot of the stuff he was reading on social media was false. The main impetus for the new research was the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. They propagated true and false news roughly equally. We generally think that bots distort the types of information that reaches the public, but-in this study at least-they don't seem to be skewing the headlines toward false news, he notes. And they're good at it, too: Tweets containing falsehoods reach 1500 people on Twitter six times faster than truthful tweets, the research reveals.īots are so new that we don't have a clear sense of what they're doing and how big of an impact they're making, says Shawn Dorius, a social scientist at Iowa State University in Ames who wasn't involved in the research. But a new study shows that people are the prime culprits when it comes to the propagation of misinformation through social networks. You might think that bots-automated systems that can share information online-are to blame. The concocted story started on a sports comedy website, but it quickly spread on social media-and people took it seriously.įrom Russian 'bots' to charges of fake news, headlines are awash in stories about dubious information going viral. presidential election, the internet was abuzz with discussion when reports surfaced that Floyd Mayweather wore a hijab to a Donald Trump rally, daring people to fight him.

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