
Fake news and false rumors reach more people than truth - yegor256a
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/largest-study-ever-fake-news-mit-twitter/555104/?single_page=true
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tlb
"By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on
Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people,"

They're comparing average views per factual tweet vs. average views per fake
tweet. The problem with this approach is that a huge number of rarely-read
factual tweets brings down the average.

To illustrate: consider a world where 90% of the people are sensible and only
read factual articles, while 10% of the people are fools who read fake
clickbait. Suppose 99% of tweets are factual, and 1% are fake. You would get
the same result: average views per fake article are higher than average views
per factual article. And yet, in this world 90% of people read only factual
articles. So the statistic may not mean what it seems to suggest.

In real life, the long tail of factual articles is much larger than the long
tail of fake articles. There are zillions of factual articles about product
releases, or city council resolutions, or criminal convictions, or CEO
replacements. So I don't think you can conclude from the study that most news
being read is fake.

