A) False news can drive misallocation of resources during terror attacks and natural disasters, the misalignment of business investments, and misinformed elections.

B) In response, researchers have offered to share their dataset, too.

C) The study compared the emotional content of replies to true and false rumors by using hashtags and English words that associate with eight basic emotions:

D) Traditional journalism organizations, for example, are potential partners.

E) The study found that “falsehood spread significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than truth in all categories of information”.

False news is more novel than true news, and that may be why we share it much faster and more widely. Responses to false news include surprise, fear and disgust. True news tends to be met with sadness, joy, anticipation, and trust. Humans are more likely than automated processes to be responsible for the spread of fake news.

These insights emerge from a study published in the journal Science. Researchers at MIT, 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. Hopes are that the research helps to persuade more people that fake news powered by social media is a serious threat to all democracies’ health. Apart from effects on elections and referendums, fake news in social media can assist hate speech to turn into communal violence more quickly.

The researchers studied what they called “rumor cascades”. A cascade starts with a Twitter user making an affirmation about a topic – with words, images, or links – and continues in an unbroken chain of retweets. 17. _________ False political news reached more people faster and went deeper into their networks than any other category of false information. The study compared the emotional content of replies to true and false rumors by using hashtags and English words that associate with eight basic emotions: anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust. Are “bots” the main culprits in spreading falsity? No – the researchers found, it’s humans.

Calling for more effort to identify the factors in human judgment that spread true and false news, the research paper points to some obvious reasons to look deeper. 18. _________

Two features of this study are promising. First, artificial intelligence was successfully deployed to good effect. Second, Twitter provided access to its data and shared its expertise. 19. _________

More honesty by the social media giants and greater collaboration by them with qualified partners in dealing with the problem of fake news is essential. 20. _________ They find, check and disseminate news, are well placed to assess veracity, attract masses of comments and discussion on social media platforms, and have a clear incentive to maintain trust in their own contributions to democratic life.