False news stories spread much more quickly and widely on Twitter than truthful ones, an imbalance driven more by people than automated "bot" accounts, researchers said on Thursday.
A study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers examining about 126,000 stories shared by some 3 million people on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 found that false news was about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted by people than true news.
The study, published in the journal Science, was one of the most comprehensive efforts to date to assess the dynamics behind how false news circulates on social media.