Evidence for the truth of a familiar saying
A saying often attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson and various other people is that
"a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on"
Very ironically, one of the things which impressed me about the commitment to accuracy of this report into the modern version of this is that they got the above quote right in the opening paragraph, quoting what Jonathan Swift actually did say and not what Twain and Churchill almost certainly didn't (except, possibly, quoting someone else.)
If you are a regular reader of social media, how often have you seen someone print a screenshot of a false story with huge numbers of likes and retweets/shares, and another of a correction to it with the truth which does not have anything like as many likes or retweets/shares?
In my case, I've seen that phenomenon a lot more than I like.
I had hoped that the fact that we tend to notice and remember such instances would create a sort of "memory effect" that precisely because they is disturbing and contrary to what we ought to be able to expect we would remember them more frequently than the instances where corrections get more attention.
Sadly a huge study of the rate at which accurate and inaccurate Tweets spread suggests that Swift was describing only too accurately what often happens on social media.
A major study by MIT researchers published this week in Science magazine,
"The spread of true and false news online"
found evidence that "Lies spread faster than the truth" particularly in respect of political news.
The authors studied all the most re-tweeted posts on Twitter over the period from 2006 to 2017 for which it was possible to identify whether the tweet was true or false.
It will be immediately obvious to any intelligent person reading this that how you categorise a tweet as true or false is absolutely critical to whether this study is worth anything. In the words of the authors,
"We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications."
The fact-checking organisations concerned included Snopes, Politifact, and FactCheck.org
When the people preparing the study had used the six fact-checking organisations to classify 126,000 tweets, which, together had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times, as true or false and determined how far and fast they spread, they found that:
I found this study deeply alarming and depressing. Nobody in the study or in the reports I have read about it has a fully satisfactory answer to what we do about it, but I do have a couple of suggestions.
1) If you see a story which you do not know for certain to be true but which really jumps out at you - either because it supports your side of an argument which is important to you or because it is particularly shocking or powerful - think very carefully before you share it. If in any doubt at all, see if there is anything you can do to check the validity of the story. When I see a story which makes me think "Whisky Tango Foxtrot!" and I check if there is any truth in that story, I frequently discover in no more than a few minutes that the story ranges from a very incomplete picture to utter rubbish.
2) Society needs to have a diverse range of media available so that the truth has at least a chance to get out that and this should include conventional "MSM" media. Politicians who seek to discredit, threaten, de-legitimise or curtail the actions of large swathes of the media in general - as opposed to correcting specific mistakes where they have evidence to back up what they say - should be regarded as highly dangerous.
"a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on"
Very ironically, one of the things which impressed me about the commitment to accuracy of this report into the modern version of this is that they got the above quote right in the opening paragraph, quoting what Jonathan Swift actually did say and not what Twain and Churchill almost certainly didn't (except, possibly, quoting someone else.)
If you are a regular reader of social media, how often have you seen someone print a screenshot of a false story with huge numbers of likes and retweets/shares, and another of a correction to it with the truth which does not have anything like as many likes or retweets/shares?
In my case, I've seen that phenomenon a lot more than I like.
I had hoped that the fact that we tend to notice and remember such instances would create a sort of "memory effect" that precisely because they is disturbing and contrary to what we ought to be able to expect we would remember them more frequently than the instances where corrections get more attention.
Sadly a huge study of the rate at which accurate and inaccurate Tweets spread suggests that Swift was describing only too accurately what often happens on social media.
A major study by MIT researchers published this week in Science magazine,
"The spread of true and false news online"
found evidence that "Lies spread faster than the truth" particularly in respect of political news.
The authors studied all the most re-tweeted posts on Twitter over the period from 2006 to 2017 for which it was possible to identify whether the tweet was true or false.
It will be immediately obvious to any intelligent person reading this that how you categorise a tweet as true or false is absolutely critical to whether this study is worth anything. In the words of the authors,
"We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications."
The fact-checking organisations concerned included Snopes, Politifact, and FactCheck.org
When the people preparing the study had used the six fact-checking organisations to classify 126,000 tweets, which, together had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times, as true or false and determined how far and fast they spread, they found that:
- "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information" and this effect was most pronounced for false political news.
- A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does.
- Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.
I found this study deeply alarming and depressing. Nobody in the study or in the reports I have read about it has a fully satisfactory answer to what we do about it, but I do have a couple of suggestions.
1) If you see a story which you do not know for certain to be true but which really jumps out at you - either because it supports your side of an argument which is important to you or because it is particularly shocking or powerful - think very carefully before you share it. If in any doubt at all, see if there is anything you can do to check the validity of the story. When I see a story which makes me think "Whisky Tango Foxtrot!" and I check if there is any truth in that story, I frequently discover in no more than a few minutes that the story ranges from a very incomplete picture to utter rubbish.
2) Society needs to have a diverse range of media available so that the truth has at least a chance to get out that and this should include conventional "MSM" media. Politicians who seek to discredit, threaten, de-legitimise or curtail the actions of large swathes of the media in general - as opposed to correcting specific mistakes where they have evidence to back up what they say - should be regarded as highly dangerous.
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