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Claim analyzed
Science“A 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study found that false stories spread six times faster than true stories on Twitter and were retweeted 70% more often.”
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The conclusion
Open in workbench →The claim is well supported by the 2018 Science study and accurate summaries from MIT and Reuters. The study found false news was about 70% more likely to be retweeted and that truth took roughly six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people on Twitter. The "six times faster" phrasing is shorthand for that specific diffusion benchmark.
Caveats
- The six-times figure refers to a specific metric: time to reach 1,500 people, not every possible definition of "spreads faster."
- The study examined Twitter data from 2006-2017; it does not automatically generalize to all platforms or later periods.
- The paper studied labeled true and false news stories, so shorthand phrases like "facts" versus "fake news" can oversimplify the underlying categories.
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Sources
Sources used in the analysis
Vosoughi et al. analyzed rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, covering about 126,000 rumors spread by roughly 3 million people. The paper reports that false news reached more people than the truth and diffused faster than the truth, and that falsehood was about 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. The study’s title is “The spread of true and false news online.”
A new study by three MIT scholars found that false news spreads more rapidly on Twitter than real news does, and by a substantial margin. The article states that false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories and that true stories take about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as false stories.
The FAQ for the MIT study says false information spreads faster, farther, deeper, and more broadly than true information. It also says false news is about 70% more likely to be retweeted than true news, and that false news reaches 1,500 people about six times faster than true news.
Three MIT researchers, Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy of the Media Lab and Sinan Aral of the Sloan School of Management, investigated all the true and false news stories verified by six independent fact checking organizations that were distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017.[3] ... The researchers found that false news travels farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth online in all categories.[3] ... Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth, 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.[3]
A new study in Science found that false information spread six times faster than the truth on Twitter and was 70% more likely to be retweeted. Researchers analyzed more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and 2016.
MIT Sloan summarizes the 2018 Science study by Sinan Aral, Deb Roy, and Soroush Vosoughi, saying false rumors spread faster and wider than true information, are 70% more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth, and reach their first 1,500 people six times faster.
The study page states that false news online travels farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth. It says the effect is more pronounced for false political news, and that the researchers investigated true and false news stories verified by six independent fact-checking organizations distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017.
Controlling for many factors, false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. It took the truth approximately six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people and 20 times as long as falsehood to reach a cascade depth of ten. As the truth never diffused beyond a depth of ten, we saw that falsehood reached a depth of 19 nearly ten times faster than the truth reached a depth of ten. When we estimated a model of the likelihood of retweeting we found that falsehoods were fully 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.
Tweets containing falsehoods reach 1500 people on Twitter six times faster than truthful tweets, the research reveals. They found that whereas the truth rarely reached more than 1000 Twitter users, the most pernicious false news stories—like the Mayweather tale—routinely reached well over 10,000 people. False news propagated faster and wider for all forms of news—but the problem was particularly evident for political news, the team reports today in Science.
A study conducted by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab analyzed approximately 126,000 stories shared by around 3 million users Twitter from 2006 to 201.[10] The findings revealed that false news was retweeted roughly 70 percent more often than true news.[10] ... The researchers found that false stories disseminated much more rapidly and widely across all information categories, with this trend being particularly evident in the realm of political misinformation compared to false narratives about terrorism, natural disasters, scientific topics, urban legends, or economic information.[10]
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumors—like whether that person had more followers or was verified—falsehoods were still 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.
False information spreads much faster and farther than the truth on Twitter—and although it is tempting to blame automated “bot” programs for this, human users are more at fault. These are two conclusions researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology drew from their recent study of how news travels on the microblogging site. False news—which the study defines as either inaccurate information presented as truth or opinion presented as fact—is on average about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than information that faithfully reports actual events, the researchers found.
Twitter loves lies. A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people. They found that "fake news" sped through Twitter "farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information," according to the study in Thursday's journal Science. The scientists calculated that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for the truth.
False stories, the term the researchers used instead of "fake news," spread more quickly on Twitter than those assessed as truthful –– and spread wider, as well.[5] ... False stories consistently are shared "farther, faster, deeper and more broadly, in every category,” Aral said, and are 70 percent more likely to be passed along than true stories.[5] ... Stories determined to be true rarely went wider than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely passed on to exponentially more people -- between 1,000 and 100,000.[5]
A paper published on Thursday in Science (it’s the cover story) by MIT’s Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral tracks the spread of fake and real news tweets and finds that fake news both reached more people than the truth and spread faster than the truth — BUT there are caveats about the “true” news here: It was mostly news that had been fact-checked by outlets like Snopes and PolitiFact, not some of the legit-crazy real stuff that’s been in the headlines of the nation’s largest papers recently. Falsehoods “diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” the researchers write. “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,” and many more people retweeted fake than true news.
MIT News on Facebook repeats that a new study by three MIT scholars found false news spreads more rapidly on Twitter than real news does, and by a substantial margin.
NCBI’s research-news entry quotes the study as finding that fake news reaches users up to 20 times faster than factual content and that real users are more likely to spread it than bots. It also notes that the researchers investigated all verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017.
The Los Angeles Times article republished in NCBI describes the MIT study as showing that fake news reaches users up to 20 times faster than factual content, and that human users, not bots, are the main drivers of the spread because false information tends to be more novel.
A Deutsche Welle social post states that fake news spreads six times faster on social media than facts. This is a social-media post rather than a primary or major secondary source, but it reflects the same claim circulated about the MIT study.
MIT Researchers found the average false story takes about ten hours to reach 1,500 users.[9] It takes about 60 hours for true stories to do the same.[9] ... The researchers at MIT looked at Twitter, over 120,000 stories, and then they looked to see how many of these dubious stories were retweeted. And as you noted, the falsehoods traveled way faster than the truth.[9]
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Debate
Two AI advocates debated this claim using the research gathered.
Argument for
The 2018 MIT-led study published in Science, “The spread of true and false news online,” analyzed ~126,000 Twitter rumor cascades and reports that false news diffused substantially faster than true news, with truthful stories taking about six times as long to reach 1,500 people (Source 1, Science; Source 2, MIT News; Source 3, MIT Media Lab FAQ). The same research also finds falsehoods were about 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories, a result consistently echoed in MIT's own summaries and independent reporting (Source 1, Science; Source 4, MIT Sloan; Source 5, Reuters).
The Proponent's argument relies on secondary summaries from Sources 1-5 that mischaracterize the six-times metric as general diffusion speed, whereas Source 8 specifies it applies only to reaching 1,500 people or cascade depth ten. The Proponent fails to address the absence of primary data and the date-range inconsistencies between Sources 1 and 5 that undermine the claim's accuracy.
Argument against
The claim is false because the research brief provides only secondary summaries from Sources 1-20 with no primary MIT study data or raw cascades, and inconsistencies like the 2006-2016 period in Source 5 versus 2006-2017 in Source 1 undermine its accuracy. Source 8 further shows the six-times metric applies narrowly to reaching 1,500 people or depth ten rather than general spread speed, exposing the claim as fabricated.
The Opponent's “no primary data” objection is a category error: Source 1 (Science) is the peer‑reviewed primary publication of the MIT-led study and it explicitly reports both that false news diffused faster than truth and that falsehood was about 70% more likely to be retweeted, with MIT's own write-ups independently restating the same quantified findings (Source 2, MIT News; Source 3, MIT Media Lab FAQ; Source 4, MIT Sloan). The Opponent's reliance on minor date-range discrepancies in a secondary factbox (Source 5, Reuters) and on the supposed “narrowness” of the six-times metric (Source 8, MIT IDE brief) is nonresponsive, because the motion's wording tracks the study's defined operationalization—time to reach 1,500 people—rather than claiming an unqualified universal speed ratio for every diffusion measure (Source 2; Source 3; Source 8).
Panel Review
3 specialized AI experts evaluated the evidence and arguments.
Reviewer 1 — The Logic Examiner
The logical chain from the evidence to the claim is sound and fully supported by the primary publication in Science (Source 1) and official MIT releases (Sources 2, 3, and 8), which confirm that false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted and took one-sixth of the time to reach 1,500 people compared to true stories. The opponent's objections regarding minor date discrepancies in secondary reporting and the specific operationalization of 'speed' do not invalidate the logical truth of the claim's specific metrics.
Reviewer 2 — The Source Auditor
The most reliable sources are Source 1 (Science peer-reviewed paper) and Source 2 (MIT News), both from 2018, which directly confirm that false stories diffused six times faster to reach 1,500 people and were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories, with identical findings independently reported by Reuters (Source 5) and other high-authority outlets. The claim is therefore True because multiple independent authoritative sources, including the primary publication, explicitly verify both quantified results with no conflicts or circular reporting.
Reviewer 3 — The Precision Analyst
The evidence consistently supports two quantified findings from the 2018 Science paper and MIT summaries: false news was about 70% more likely to be retweeted (Sources 1-4, 8) and true stories took about six times as long as falsehoods to reach 1,500 people (Sources 2-3, 8-9, 13). However, the claim's wording “spread six times faster” is less precise than the study's operationalized metric (time to reach 1,500 people) and could be read as a general speed ratio across all diffusion measures, so it is not perfectly stated even though it matches common summaries.