2 published verifications about Twitter Twitter ×
“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.”
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.
“Elon Musk's claim that fewer than 5% of Twitter/X's monetizable daily active users are bots is accurate.”
This claim is misleading on multiple levels. First, Elon Musk himself publicly disputed the "<5%" bot figure during the Twitter acquisition, claiming bots exceeded 20% — so attributing this figure to him as "accurate" is paradoxical. Second, the "<5%" estimate was never independently verified; the most direct supporting evidence comes from litigation testimony by Musk's own legal defense. Third, while many studies suggesting far higher bot rates measure different metrics than mDAU, the sheer scale of bot activity on X (800 million accounts suspended for spam in 2024 alone) raises serious doubts about the figure's practical accuracy.