Before truth can tie its shoes

I’ve heard the saying that a lie can get around the world before truth can tie its shoes. Researchers at MIT have now verified that saying is true. At least on Twitter.

The team reviewed 126 thousand stories tweeted and retweeted by about 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. They used independent fact-checking organizations to classify the tweets. They ignored bots. And (as summarized by Meteor Blades on Daily Kos) they…

determined that a false story takes an average of 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users while it takes a true story 60 hours to do the same. They found that true stories almost never get retweeted to 1,000 people, while the top 1 percent of false stories reach as many as 100,000 people.