SOCIAL SCIENCE
The spread of true and false
news online
Soroush Vosoughi,1
Deb Roy,1
Sinan Aral2
*
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.
F
oundational theories of decision-making
(1–3), cooperation (4), communication (5),
and markets (6) all view some conceptualization
of truth or accuracy as central
to the functioning of nearly every human
endeavor. Yet, both true and false information
spreads rapidly through online media. Defining
what is true and false has become a common
political strategy, replacing debates based on
a mutually agreed on set of facts. Our economies
are not immune to the spread of falsity either.
False rumors have affected stock prices and the
motivation for large-scale investments, for example,
wiping out $130 billion in stock value
after a false tweet claimed that Barack Obama
was injured in an explosion (7). Indeed, our responses
to everything from natural disasters
(8, 9) to terrorist attacks (10) have been disrupted
by the spread of false news online.
New social technologies, which facilitate rapid
information sharing and large-scale information
cascades, can enable the spread of misinformation
(i.e., information that is inaccurate or misleading).
But although more and more of our access to
information and news is guided by these new
technologies (11), we know little about their contribution
to the spread of falsity online. Though
considerable attention has been paid to anecdotal
analyses of the spread of false news by the media
(12), there are few large-scale empirical investigations
of the diffusion of misinformation or itssocial
origins. Studies of the spread of misinformation
are currently limited to analyses of small, ad hoc
samples that ignore two of the most important
scientific questions: How do truth and falsity
diffuse differently, and what factors of human
judgment explain these differences?
Current work analyzes the spread of single
rumors, like the discovery of the Higgs boson
(13) or the Haitian earthquake of 2010 (14), and
multiple rumors from a single disaster event, like
the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 (10), or it
develops theoretical models of rumor diffusion
(15), methods for rumor detection (16), credibility
evaluation (17, 18), or interventions to curtail the
spread of rumors (19). But almost no studies comprehensively
evaluate differences in the spread
of truth and falsity across topics or examine
why false news may spread differently than the
truth. For example, although Del Vicario et al.
(20) and Bessi et al. (21) studied the spread of
scientific and conspiracy-theory stories, they
did not evaluate their veracity. Scientific and
conspiracy-theory stories can both be either true
or false, and they differ on stylistic dimensions
that are important to their spread but orthogonal
to their veracity. To understand the spread of
false news, it is necessary to examine diffusion
after differentiating true and false scientific stories
and true and false conspiracy-theory stories and
controlling for the topical and stylistic differences
between the categories themselves. The only study
to date that segments rumors by veracity is that of
Friggeri et al. (19), who analyzed ~4000 rumors
spreading on Facebook and focused more on how
fact checking affects rumor propagation than on
how falsity diffuses differently than the truth (22).
In our current political climate and in the
academic literature, a fluid terminology has arisen
around “fake news,” foreign interventions in
U.S. politics through social media, and our understanding
of what constitutes news, fake news,
false news, rumors, rumor cascades, and other
related terms. Although, at one time, it may have
been appropriate to think of fake news as referring
to the veracity of a news story, we now
believe that this phrase has been irredeemably
polarized in our current political and media climate.
As politicians have implemented a political
strategy of labeling news sources that do not
support their positions as unreliable or fake news,
whereas sources that support their positions are
labeled reliable or not fake, the term has lost all
connection to the actual veracity of the information
presented, rendering it meaningless for use
in academic classification. We have therefore explicitly
avoided the term fake news throughout
this paper and instead use the more objectively
verifiable terms “true” or “false” news. Although
the terms fake news and misinformation also
imply a willful distortion of the truth, we do not
make any claims about the intent of the purveyors
of the information in our analyses. We instead
focus our attention on veracity and stories that
have been verified as true or false.
We also purposefully adopt a broad definition
of the term news. Rather than defining what
constitutes news on the basis of the institutional
source of the assertions in a story, we refer to any
asserted claim made on Twitter as news (we defend
this decision in the supplementary materials
section on “reliable sources,” section S1.2). We
define news as any story or claim with an assertion
in it and a rumor as the social phenomena
of a news story or claim spreading or diffusing
through the Twitter network. That is, rumors are
inherently social and involve the sharing of claims
between people. News, on the other hand, is an
assertion with claims, whether it is shared or not.
A rumor cascade begins on Twitter when a
user makes an assertion about a topic in a tweet,
which could include written text, photos, or links
to articles online. Others then propagate the
rumor by retweeting it. A rumor’s diffusion process
can be characterized as having one or more
cascades, which we define as instances of a rumorspreading
pattern that exhibit an unbroken retweet
chain with a common, singular origin. For
example, an individual could start a rumor cascade
by tweeting a story or claim with an assertion
in it, and another individual could independently
start a second cascade of the same rumor (pertaining
to the same story or claim) that is completely
independent of the first cascade, except
that it pertains to the same story or claim. If they
remain independent, they represent two cascades
of the same rumor. Cascades can be as small as size
one (meaningno one retweeted the original tweet).
The number of cascades that make up a rumor is
equal to the number of times the story or claim was
independently tweeted by a user (not retweeted).
So, if a rumor “A” is tweeted by 10 people separately,
but not retweeted, it would have 10 cascades,
each of size one. Conversely, if a second rumor
“B” is independently tweeted by two people and
each of those two tweets is retweeted 100 times,
the rumor would consist of two cascades, each
of size 100.
Here we investigate the differential diffusion
of true, false, and mixed (partially true, partially
false) news stories using a comprehensive data
set of all of the fact-checked rumor cascades that
spread on Twitter from its inception in 2006 to
2017. The data include ~126,000 rumor cascades
spread by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million
times. We sampled all rumor cascades investigated
by six independent fact-checking organizations
RESEARCH
Vosoughi et al., Science 359, 1146–1151 (2018) 9 March 2018 1 of 6
1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Media Lab,
E14-526, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. 2
MIT,
E62-364, 100 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
*Corresponding author. Email: sinan@mit.edu
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(snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com,
hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.
about.com) by parsing the title, body, and verdict
(true, false, or mixed) of each rumor investigation
reported on their websites and automatically
collecting the cascades corresponding to those
rumors on Twitter. The result was a sample of
rumor cascades whose veracity had been agreed
on by these organizations between 95 and 98% of
the time. We cataloged the diffusion of the rumor
cascades by collecting all English-language replies
to tweets that contained a link to any of the
aforementioned websites from 2006 to 2017 and
used optical character recognition to extract text
from images where needed. For each reply tweet,
we extracted the original tweet being replied to
and all the retweets of the original tweet. Each
retweet cascade represents a rumor propagating
on Twitter that has been verified as true or false
by the fact-checking organizations (see the supplementary
materials for more details on cascade
construction). We then quantified the cascades’
depth (the number of retweet hops from the
origin tweet over time, where a hop is a retweet
by a new unique user), size (the number of users
involved in the cascade over time), maximum
breadth (the maximum number of users involved
in the cascade at any depth), and structural virality
(23) (a measure that interpolates between
content spread through a single, large broadcast
and that which spreads through multiple generations,
with any one individual directly responsible
for only a fraction of the total spread) (see
the supplementary materials for more detail on
the measurement of rumor diffusion).
As a rumor is retweeted, the depth, size, maximum
breadth, and structural virality of the cascade
increase (Fig. 1A). A greater fraction of false
rumors experienced between 1 and 1000 cascades,
whereas a greater fraction of true rumors experienced
more than 1000 cascades (Fig. 1B); this was
also true for rumors based on political news (Fig.
1D). The total number of false rumors peaked at
the end of both 2013 and 2015 and again at the
end of 2016, corresponding to the last U.S. presidential
election (Fig. 1C). The data also show
clear increases in the total number of false political
rumors during the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential
elections (Fig. 1E) and a spike in rumors
that contained partially true and partially false
information during the Russian annexation of
Crimea in 2014 (Fig. 1E). Politics was the largest
rumor category in our data, with ~45,000 cascades,
followed by urban legends, business, terrorism,
science, entertainment, and natural disasters
(Fig. 1F).
When we analyzed the diffusion dynamics of
true and false rumors, we found that falsehood
diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and
more broadly than the truth in all categories of
information [Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) tests are
reported in tables S3 to S10]. A significantly greater
fraction of false cascades than true cascades
exceeded a depth of 10, and the top 0.01% of false
cascades diffused eight hops deeper into the
Twittersphere than the truth, diffusing to depths
Vosoughi et al., Science 359, 1146–1151 (2018) 9 March 2018 2 of 6
Fig. 1. Rumor cascades. (A) An example rumor cascade collected by our
method as well as its depth, size, maximum breadth, and structural virality over
time. “Nodes” are users. (B) The complementary cumulative distribution
functions (CCDFs) of true, false, and mixed (partially true and partially false)
cascades, measuring the fraction of rumors that exhibit a given number of
cascades. (C) Quarterly counts of all true, false, and mixed rumor cascades
that diffused on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, annotated with example rumors
in each category. (D) The CCDFs of true, false, and mixed political cascades.
(E) Quarterly counts of all true, false, and mixed political rumor cascades that
diffused on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, annotated with example rumors in
each category. (F) A histogram of the total number of rumor cascades in our
data across the seven most frequent topical categories.
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greater than 19 hops from the origin tweet (Fig.
2A). Falsehood also reached far more people than
the truth. Whereas the truth rarely diffused to
more than 1000 people, the top 1% of false-news
cascades routinely diffused to between 1000 and
100,000 people (Fig.2B). Falsehood reached more
people at every depth of a cascade than the truth,
meaning that many more people retweeted falsehood
than they did the truth (Fig. 2C). The spread
of falsehood was aided by its virality, meaning
that falsehood did not simply spread through
broadcast dynamics but rather through peer-topeer
diffusion characterized by a viral branching
process (Fig. 2D).
It took the truth about six times as long as
falsehood to reach 1500 people (Fig. 2F) and
20 times as long as falsehood to reach a cascade
depth of 10 (Fig. 2E). As the truth never diffused
beyond a depth of 10, we saw that falsehood
reached a depth of 19 nearly 10 times faster than
the truth reached a depth of 10 (Fig. 2E). Falsehood
also diffused significantly more broadly (Fig. 2H)
and was retweeted by more unique users than the
truth at every cascade depth (Fig. 2G).
False political news (Fig. 1D) traveled deeper
(Fig. 3A) and more broadly (Fig. 3C), reached more
people (Fig. 3B), and was more viral than any other
category of false information (Fig. 3D). False political
news also diffused deeper more quickly
(Fig. 3E) and reached more than 20,000 people
nearly three times faster than all other types of
false news reached 10,000 people (Fig. 3F). Although
the other categories of false news reached
about the same number of unique users at depths
between 1 and 10, false political news routinely
reached the most unique users at depths greater
than 10 (Fig. 3G). Although all other categories
of false news traveled slightly more broadly at
shallower depths, false political news traveled
more broadly at greater depths, indicating that
more-popular false political news items exhibited
broader and more-accelerated diffusion dynamics
Vosoughi et al., Science 359, 1146–1151 (2018) 9 March 2018 3 of 6
Fig. 2. Complementary cumulative distribution functions (CCDFs) of
true and false rumor cascades. (A) Depth. (B) Size. (C) Maximum
breadth. (D) Structural virality. (E and F) The number of minutes it
takes for true and false rumor cascades to reach any (E) depth and (F)
number of unique Twitter users. (G) The number of unique Twitter
users reached at every depth and (H) the mean breadth of true and
false rumor cascades at every depth. In (H), plot is lognormal. Standard
errors were clustered at the rumor level (i.e., cascades belonging to
the same rumor were clustered together; see supplementary materials
for additional details).
Fig. 3. Complementary cumulative distribution functions (CCDFs) of
false political and other types of rumor cascades. (A) Depth. (B) Size.
(C) Maximum breadth. (D) Structural virality. (E and F) The number of
minutes it takes for false political and other false news cascades to reach
any (E) depth and (F) number of unique Twitter users. (G) The number
of unique Twitter users reached at every depth and (H) the mean breadth
of these false rumor cascades at every depth. In (H), plot is lognormal.
Standard errors were clustered at the rumor level.
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(Fig. 3H). Analysis of all news categories showed
thatnewsaboutpolitics,urbanlegends,andscience
spread to the most people, whereas news about
politics and urban legends spread the fastest
and were the most viral in terms of their structural
virality (see fig. S11 for detailed comparisons
across all topics).
One might suspect that structural elements of
the network or individual characteristics of the
users involved in the cascades explain why falsity
travels with greater velocity than the truth. Perhaps
those who spread falsity “followed” more
people, had more followers, tweeted more often,
were more often “verified” users, or had been on
Twitter longer. But when we compared users involved
in true and false rumor cascades, we
found that the opposite was true in every case.
Users who spread false news had significantly
fewer followers (K-S test = 0.104, P ~ 0.0),
followed significantly fewer people (K-S test =
0.136, P ~ 0.0), were significantly less active on
Twitter (K-S test = 0.054, P ~ 0.0), were verified
significantly less often (K-S test = 0.004, P < 0.001),
and had been on Twitter for significantly less time
(K-S test = 0.125, P ~ 0.0) (Fig. 4A). Falsehood
diffused farther and faster than the truth despite
these differences, not because of them.
When we estimated a model of the likelihood
of retweeting, we found that falsehoods were
70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth
(Wald chi-square test, P ~ 0.0), even when controlling
for the account age, activity level, and
number of followers and followees of the original
tweeter, as well as whether the original tweeter
was a verified user (Fig. 4B). Because user
characteristics and network structure could not
explain the differential diffusion of truth and
falsity, we sought alternative explanations for
the differences in their diffusion dynamics.
One alternative explanation emerges from information
theory and Bayesian decision theory.
Novelty attracts human attention (24), contributes
to productive decision-making (25), and
encourages information sharing (26) because
novelty updates our understanding of the world.
When information is novel, it is not only surprising,
but also more valuable, both from an information
theoretic perspective [in that it provides
the greatest aid to decision-making (25)] and
from a social perspective [in that it conveys social
status on one that is “in the know” or has
access to unique “inside” information (26)]. We
therefore tested whether falsity was more novel
than the truth and whether Twitter users were
more likely to retweet information that was
more novel.
To assess novelty, we randomly selected ~5000
users who propagated true and false rumors and
extracted a random sample of ~25,000 tweets
that they were exposed to in the 60 days prior
to their decision to retweet a rumor. We then
specified a latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic model
(27), with 200 topics and trained on 10 million
English-language tweets, to calculate the information
distance between the rumor tweets
and all the prior tweets that users were exposed
to before retweeting the rumor tweets. This
generated a probability distribution over the
200 topics for each tweet in our data set. We then
measured how novel the information in the true
and false rumors was by comparing the topic
distributions of the rumor tweets with the topic
distributions of the tweets to which users were
exposed in the 60 days before their retweet. We
found that false rumors were significantly more
Vosoughi et al., Science 359, 1146–1151 (2018) 9 March 2018 4 of 6
Fig. 4. Models estimating correlates of news diffusion, the novelty of
true and false news, and the emotional content of replies to news.
(A) Descriptive statistics on users who participated in true and false rumor
cascades as well as K-S tests of the differences in the distributions of these
measures across true and false rumor cascades. (B) Results of a logistic
regression model estimating users’ likelihood of retweeting a rumor as a
function of variables shown at the left. coeff, logit coefficient; z, z score.
(C) Differences in the information uniqueness (IU), scaled Bhattacharyya
distance (BD), and K-L divergence (KL) of true (green) and false (red)
rumor tweets compared to the corpus of prior tweets the user was exposed
to in the 60 days before retweeting the rumor tweet. (D) The emotional
content of replies to true (green) and false (red) rumor tweets across
seven dimensions categorized by the NRC. (E) Mean and variance
of the IU, KL, and BD of true and false rumor tweets compared to the
corpus of prior tweets the user has seen in the 60 days before seeing the
rumor tweet as well as K-S tests of their differences across true and false
rumors. (F) Mean and variance of the emotional content of replies to
true and false rumor tweets across seven dimensions categorized
by the NRC as well as K-S tests of their differences across true and
false rumors. All standard errors are clustered at the rumor level,
and all models are estimated with cluster-robust standard errors at
the rumor level.
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novel than the truth across all novelty metrics,
displaying significantly higher information
uniqueness (K-S test = 0.457, P ~ 0.0) (28),
Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence (K-S test =
0.433, P ~ 0.0) (29), and Bhattacharyya distance
(K-S test = 0.415, P ~ 0.0) (which is similar to the
Hellinger distance) (30). The last two metrics
measure differences between probability distributions
representing the topical content of the
incoming tweet and the corpus of previous tweets
to which users were exposed.
Although false rumors were measurably more
novel than true rumors, users may not have perceived
them as such. We therefore assessed users’
perceptions of the information contained in true
and false rumors by comparing the emotional
content of replies to true and false rumors. We
categorized the emotion in the replies by using
the leading lexicon curated by the National Research
Council Canada (NRC), which provides a
comprehensive list of ~140,000 English words
and their associations with eight emotions based
on Plutchik’s (31) work on basic emotion—anger,
fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy,
and disgust (32)—and a list of ~32,000 Twitter
hashtags and their weighted associations with
the same emotions (33). We removed stop words
and URLs from the reply tweets and calculated
the fraction of words in the tweets that related to
each of the eight emotions, creating a vector of
emotion weights for each reply that summed to
one across the emotions. We found that false
rumors inspired replies expressing greater surprise
(K-S test = 0.205, P ~ 0.0), corroborating the
novelty hypothesis, and greater disgust (K-S test =
0.102, P ~ 0.0), whereas the truth inspired replies
that expressed greater sadness (K-S test = 0.037,
P ~ 0.0), anticipation (K-S test = 0.038, P ~ 0.0),
joy (K-S test = 0.061, P ~ 0.0), and trust (K-S test =
0.060, P ~ 0.0) (Fig. 4, D and F). The emotions
expressed in reply to falsehoods may illuminate
additional factors, beyond novelty, that inspire
people to share false news. Although we cannot
claim that novelty causes retweets or that novelty
is the only reason why false news is retweeted
more often, we do find that false news is more
novel and that novel information is more likely
to be retweeted.
Numerous diagnostic statistics and manipulation
checks validated our results and confirmed
their robustness. First, as there were multiple
cascades for every true and false rumor, the variance
of and error terms associated with cascades
corresponding to the same rumor will be correlated.
We therefore specified cluster-robust
standard errors and calculated all variance statistics
clustered at the rumor level. We tested the
robustness of our findings to this specification
by comparing analyses with and without clustered
errors and found that, although clustering reduced
the precision of our estimates as expected, the
directions, magnitudes, and significance of our
results did not change, and chi-square (P ~ 0.0)
and deviance (d) goodness-of-fit tests (d = 3.4649 ×
10–6
, P ~ 1.0) indicate that the models are well
specified (see supplementary materials for more
detail).
Second, a selection bias may arise from the
restriction of our sample to tweets fact checked
by the six organizations we relied on. Fact checking
may select certain types of rumors or draw additional
attention to them. To validate the robustness
of our analysis to this selection and the
generalizability of our results to all true and false
rumor cascades, we independently verified a second
sample of rumor cascades that were not verified
by any fact-checking organization. These
rumors were fact checked by three undergraduate
students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) and Wellesley College. We trained
the students to detect and investigate rumors with
our automated rumor-detection algorithm running
on 3 million English-language tweets from
2016 (34). The undergraduate annotators investigated
the veracity of the detected rumors using
simple search queries on the web. We asked them
to label the rumors as true, false, or mixed on the
basis of their research and to discard all rumors
previously investigated by one of the fact-checking
organizations. The annotators, who worked independently
and were not aware of one another,
agreed on the veracity of 90% of the 13,240 rumor
cascades that they investigated and achieved a
Fleiss’ kappa of 0.88. When we compared the
diffusion dynamics of the true and false rumors
that the annotators agreed on, we found results
nearly identical to those estimated with our
main data set (see fig. S17). False rumors in the
robustness data set had greater depth (K-S test =
0.139, P ~ 0.0), size (K-S test = 0.131, P ~ 0.0), maximum
breadth (K-S test = 0.139, P ~ 0.0), structural
virality (K-S test = 0.066, P ~ 0.0), and speed
(fig. S17) and a greater number of unique users
at each depth (fig. S17). When we broadened the
analysis to include majority-rule labeling, rather
than unanimity, we again found the same results
(see supplementary materials for results using
majority-rule labeling).
Third, although the differential diffusion of
truth and falsity is interesting with or without
robot, or bot, activity, one may worry that our
conclusions about human judgment may be
biased by the presence of bots in our analysis.
We therefore used a sophisticated bot-detection
algorithm (35) to identify and remove all bots
before running the analysis. When we added
bot traffic back into the analysis, we found that
none of our main conclusions changed—false
news still spread farther, faster, deeper, and more
broadly than the truth in all categories of information.
The results remained the same when we
removed all tweet cascades started by bots, including
human retweets of original bot tweets (see
supplementary materials, section S8.3) and when
we used a second, independent bot-detection
algorithm (see supplementary materials, section
S8.3.5) and varied the algorithm’s sensitivity
threshold to verify the robustness of our analysis
(see supplementary materials, section S8.3.4).
Although the inclusion of bots, as measured by
the two state-of-the-art bot-detection algorithms
we used in our analysis, accelerated the spread
of both true and false news, it affected their
spread roughly equally. This suggests that false
news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more
broadly than the truth because humans, not robots,
are more likely to spread it.
Finally, more research on the behavioral explanations
of differences in the diffusion of true
and false news is clearly warranted. In particular,
more robust identification of the factors
of human judgment that drive the spread of true
and false news online requires more direct interaction
with users through interviews, surveys, lab
experiments, and even neuroimaging. We encourage
these and other approaches to the investigation
of the factors of human judgment that drive
the spread of true and false news in future work.
False news can drive the misallocation of resources
during terror attacks and natural disasters,
the misalignment of business investments,
and misinformed elections. Unfortunately, although
the amount of false news online is clearly increasing
(Fig. 1, C and E), the scientific understanding
of how and why false news spreads is
currently based on ad hoc rather than large-scale
systematic analyses. Our analysis of all the verified
true and false rumors that spread on Twitter
confirms that false news spreads more pervasively
than the truth online. It also overturns conventional
wisdom about how false news spreads.
Though one might expect network structure
and individual characteristics of spreaders to
favor and promote false news, the opposite is
true. The greater likelihood of people to retweet
falsity more than the truth is what drives
the spread of false news, despite network and
individual factors that favor the truth. Furthermore,
although recent testimony before congressional
committees on misinformation in the
United States has focused on the role of bots in
spreading false news (36), we conclude that
human behavior contributes more to the differential
spread of falsity and truth than automated
robots do. This implies that misinformationcontainment
policies should also emphasize behavioral
interventions, like labeling and incentives
to dissuade the spread of misinformation, rather
than focusing exclusively on curtailing bots. Understanding
how false news spreads is the first
step toward containing it. We hope our work inspires
more large-scale research into the causes
and consequences of the spread of false news as
well as its potential cures.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are indebted to Twitter for providing funding and access to
the data. We are also grateful to members of the MIT research
community for invaluable discussions. The research was approved
by the MIT institutional review board. The analysis code is freely
available at https://goo.gl/forms/AKIlZujpexhN7fY33. The entire
data set is also available, from the same link, upon signing an
access agreement stating that (i) you shall only use the data set
for the purpose of validating the results of the MIT study and for no
other purpose; (ii) you shall not attempt to identify, reidentify, or
otherwise deanonymize the data set; and (iii) you shall not further
share, distribute, publish, or otherwise disseminate the data set.
Those who wish to use the data for any other purposes can contact
and make a separate agreement with Twitter.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
www.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146/suppl/DC1
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S20
Tables S1 to S39
References (37–75)
14 September 2017; accepted 19 January 2018
10.1126/science.aap9559
Vosoughi et al., Science 359, 1146–1151 (2018) 9 March 2018 6 of 6
RESEARCH | REPORT
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Science (ISSN 1095-9203) is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 1200 New York Avenue NW,
Washington, DC 20005. The title Science is a registered trademark of AAAS.
Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim
to original U.S. Government Works
The spread of true and false news online
Soroush VosoughiDeb RoySinan Aral
Science, 359 (6380),
Lies spread faster than the truth
There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social wellbeing.
To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006
to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by #3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth;
the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused
to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional
reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.
Science, this issue p. 1146
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