It is not a Twitter bot that it diffuses fake news but it turns out to be an ordinary person

The so-called "fake news" in which the content is not grounded or it is totally detestable is known for spreading explosively through the Internet, but the reason why fake news diffuse is that in a bot where automatic tweeting is done on Twitter etc. It is not clear that it is an ordinary human being.

The spread of true and false news online | Science
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

Scientists prove that truth is no match for fiction on Twitter | Technology | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/08/scientists-truth-fiction-twitter-bots

In order to investigate the mechanism by which Professor Shinan · Arar Professors at MIT examines the mechanism by which fake news diffuse, over 12,500 stories which have been tweeted more than 4.5 million times on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 I investigated. As a result, it was found that the top 1% of fake news spread from 1,000 to 100,000 people, while the truth (fact) tweets rarely spread to over 1000 people. In other words, it was found that the wrong information was more tweeted and diffused than the true information.

It is clear that ease of diffusion is also manifested in spreading speed. According to the survey, the speed of spreading to 1,500 users was found that the truth tweets take 6 times longer than the fake tweets. And it seems that the time it takes for the tweet to reach ten layers is twenty times longer than the fake Tweet about the multilayered phenomenon where tweets call tweets.

Researchers believe that "the desire for novelty" is about why humans are likely to spread fake news. And it is pointed out that the fact that you know the novelty information and that you have access to information sources may be the status on the net. It is also known that the theme of 'politics' is the most diffusible in the fake news which is more easily diffused than the truth. Political fake news seems to be far more diffusing than fake news on the themes of terrorism, natural disasters, science, economics, urban legends.


In general, in the problem that fake news diffuses on Twitter, there was an indication that the "bot" which automatically misrepresents false information has a big influence. In this study, I heard that Bot knows that the contribution to spreading is about the same, whether fake information or true information. In other words, the bot spreads both fake information and true information to the same extent. In addition, it was verified even under the condition that the bot murmured among the enormous tweets, and it was found that the degree of influence on the diffusion of fake news with bot and without bot was not large. From the above results, it is estimated that false information spreads faster than true information, because humans are more likely to spread fake information.

The conclusion that human contribution to the spread of fake news is high may also help to counter the fake news diffusion problem. Traditionally, emphasis has been placed on containment of bots that automatically tweak fake news, but in order to prevent further information from further spreading in the future, it is necessary to label "not a fact" It is likely to be encouraged to encourage to point out that it is not a fact.