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. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

The spread of true and false news online

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.

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Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

Evaluating Model Fit

What is Twitter

This paper is based on a review of how previous studies have defined and operationalized the term “fake news.” An examination of 34 academic articles that used the term “fake news” between 2003 and...

Defining “Fake News”: A typology of scholarly definitions

This study examines the influence of debate viewing-social media multitasking on campaign knowledge during the 2012 presidential election. Results from three waves of a national cross-sectional survey of U.S. adults conducted during and after the 2012 presidential election suggest that social networking site (SNS) use overall correlates with increased knowledge of campaign issues and facts above and beyond the use of other sources of news media. In addition, watching a debate with or without simultaneous social media engagement is better for knowledge generation than not viewing a debate at all, but the effect of debate viewing is dulled when simultaneously engaging in social media multitasking. The debate viewing-social media multitasking effect is moderated by candidate preference, with differential learning occurring largely for knowledge that is favorable to one’s preferred candidate.

The Changing Nature of Political Debate Consumption: Social Media, Multitasking, and Knowledge Acquisition

The purpose of this article is to investigate the consequences of judicial campaign activity for the perceived legitimacy of the Pennsylvania judiciary. The authors find that politicized campaign a...

The Effects of Judicial Campaign Activity on the Legitimacy of Courts: A Survey-Based Experiment

How Americans encounter, recall and act upon digital news

Using the Integrated Model of Behavioral Prediction, this study examines the effects of exposure to sexual content on television by genre, specifically looking at comedy, drama, cartoon, and reality programs, on adolescents’ sex-related cognitions and behaviors Additionally, we compared the amount and explicitness of sexual content as well as the frequency of risk and responsibility messages in these four genres Findings show that overall exposure to sexual content on television was not related to teens’ engagement in sexual intercourse the following year When examined by genre, exposure to sexual content in comedies was positively associated while exposure to sexual content in dramas was negatively associated with attitudes regarding sex, perceived normative pressure, and ultimately engaging in sex 1 year later Implications of adolescent exposure to various types of content and for using genre categories to examine exposure and effects are discussed

Does the Effect of Exposure to TV Sex on Adolescent Sexual Behavior Vary by Genre

This paper evaluates the two most common methods of measuring voter time-of-decision—the recall method and the panel method—and asks whether the two methods are consistent with each other Using data from the National Annenberg Election Survey collected during the 2008 US presidential election, the findings suggest that these two methods measure different concepts, and thus cannot be used interchangeably Furthermore, discrepancies between the two methods suggest that the accepted model of early, campaign, and late decision-making should be adjusted to account for a fourth group of voters that never changes their vote intention, but does not truly commit to that intention until later in the campaign The concept of uncommitted early deciders is offered to describe this group, created by combining the two methods

Jeffrey A. Gottfried

Papers

The Changing Nature of Political Debate Consumption: Social Media, Multitasking, and Knowledge Acquisition

The Effects of Judicial Campaign Activity on the Legitimacy of Courts: A Survey-Based Experiment

How Americans encounter, recall and act upon digital news

Does the Effect of Exposure to TV Sex on Adolescent Sexual Behavior Vary by Genre

I Knew it All Along! Evaluating Time-of-Decision Measures in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign