Statistics and Circulation of Fake News

Fake news had been spreading really fast nowadays. Here are some statistics on how fake news circulates:

DW Akademie stated that, “false information travels six times faster than the truth and reaches more people on Twitter than true stories”. It was proven by researchers that the average fake news story spread to 1,500 users in 10 hours. That is why, fake news is 70 percent more likely to be retweeted. Statistics also showed that cases of fake news increased more than 16 times from August of 206 to January of 2017. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, interested in how and why true and false news stories spread differently, used 126,000 stories that had been tweeted by 3 million people a total of 4.5 million times

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How Fake News Circulates

It has been proved that fake news travel faster than real news in social media. Fake news are more likely to be retweeted on Twitter because it is more believable than true stories. Some people retweet fake news because it brings them joy, and contentment while true stories bring grief or sadness. That is why they people tend to share fake news. This is not only happening in Twitter but also in other social media platforms like Facebook. Fake news circulates fast because of us, people. If we are only taking time to read articles and watch news, we would know how to differentiate fake news from the true ones.

And if that is the case, we can stop sharing or retweeting fake news that we see in social

This only means that we are the ones responsible for the spreading of fake news.