Thus, we cannot conclude from this study that lies always travel faster than the truth

Bruns, Axel & Keller, Tobias (2020) News diffusion on Twitter: Comparing the dissemination careers for mainstream and marginal news. In International Conference on Social Media and Society, 2020-07-22 - 2020-07-24. (Unpublished). https://eprints.qut.edu.au/202868/

Description: Current scholarly as well as mainstream media discussion expresses substantial concerns about the influence of ‘problematic information’ (Jack 2017) from hyperpartisan and downright fraudulent news sources on public debate and public opinion formation (e.g., Humprecht 2018). Often encapsulated by the imprecise term ‘fake news’, the publishers of such content seek to exploit network effects, that is, the absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles in social media spaces (Bruns 2019) to maximise the visibility and dissemination of their content. They do so for a combination of political and commercial reasons (Wardle & Derakhshan 2017). Some recent studies – most prominently an article by Vosoughi et al. (2018) in Science, examining story dissemination on Twitter – present evidence that such marginal, hyperpartisan and propagandist sites are outpacing their more mainstream counterparts in the dissemination of content: put simply, ‘fake news’ content seems to spread more quickly across social networks than ‘real news’. The generalisability of such findings is limited, however, by the source data: for instance, to establish a comparison between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ news, Vosoughi et al. (2018) consider only news stories that were evaluated by a fact-checking organisation. But this introduces a systematic bias: news stories that were dubious or controversial enough to warrant fact-checking may well disseminate in entirely different ways from stories that are more obviously truthful or incorrect. Uncontroversially truthful stories from mainstream news outlets could well disseminate across Twitter with greater speed than the ‘fake news’ content observed by Vosoughi et al., but such stories would not have been included in their analysis unless they had been fact-checked. Thus, we cannot conclude from this study that lies always travel faster than the truth.