Sorry, I Lied About Fake News

[Celerity]

A false tweet really does move faster than the truth.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/03/fake-news-misinformation-mit-study/629396/

https://archive.ph/JhJ7F



Okay this is embarrassing: The news I shared the other day, about the sharing of fake news, was fake. That news—which, again, let’s be clear, was fake—concerned a well-known MIT study from 2018 that analyzed the spread of news stories on Twitter. Using data drawn from 3 million Twitter users from 2006 to 2017, the research team, led by Soroush Vosoughi, a computer scientist who is now at Dartmouth, found that fact-checked news stories moved differently through social networks depending on whether they were true or false. “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth,” they wrote in their paper for the journal Science.

“False Stories Travel Way Faster Than the Truth,” read the English-language headlines (and also the ones in French, German, and Portuguese) when the paper first appeared online. In the four years since, that viral paper on virality has been cited about 5,000 times by other academic papers and mentioned in more than 500 news outlets. According to Altmetric, which computes an “attention score” for published scientific papers, the MIT study has also earned a mention in 13 Wikipedia articles and one U.S. patent.

Then, this week, an excellent feature article on the study of misinformation appeared in Science, by the reporter Kai Kupferschmidt. Buried halfway through was an intriguing tidbit: The MIT study had failed to account for a bias in its selection of news stories, the article claimed. When different researchers reanalyzed the data last year, controlling for that bias, they found no effect—“the difference between the speed and reach of false news and true news disappeared.” So the landmark paper had been … completely wrong?

Read: The grim conclusions of the largest-ever study of fake news

It was more bewildering than that: When I looked up the reanalysis in question, I found that it had mostly been ignored. Written by Jonas Juul, of Cornell University, and Johan Ugander, of Stanford, and published in November 2021, it has accumulated just six citations in the research literature. Altmetrics suggests that it was covered by six news outlets, while not a single Wikipedia article or U.S. patent has referenced its findings. In other words, Vosoughi et al.’s fake news about fake news had traveled much further, deeper, and more quickly than the truth.

snip

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Being wrong is NOT being fake

To my mind, a lie is when the liar knows the lie is wrong or fake.

When a child says "The tooth fairy gave me a quarter", we don't say they are lying.

When a scientist said "A neutrino has no mass" in 2000, they weren't lying. Neutrinos were found to have tiny mass in 2001.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. In this case the wrong (not fake) news had a three year head start, so

... so it is wrong to compare the penetration and speed.

Vosoughi et al.’s fake news about fake news had traveled much further, deeper, and more quickly than the truth.

Apples and oranges. Four years since 2018 and one year since 2021.