03/03/2026
In 2018, a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analyzed 126,000 news cascades on Twitter (now X), shared by around three million users. The result was striking: false news spread faster, deeper, and more widely than true news. Moreover, the most dramatic gap was not in medicine or finance, but in politics.
Most notably, bots accelerated the spread of both true and false news at roughly the same rate. Falsehood prevailed not because of technology, but because of people. False news triggered surprise, fear, and disgust, whereas the truth elicited sadness, predictability, and trust. In other words, false stories spread more successfully because they are more emotionally compelling than the truth.
This study by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, published in Science, became one of the most cited scientific papers of 2018. More importantly, over the following six years, its findings were confirmed, extended, and refined by dozens of subsequent studies. It is these studies that are now reshaping our understanding of how to counter disinformation.
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