from Hacker News

Why Rumors Outrace the Truth Online

by metermaid on 9/29/14, 5:29 PM with 15 comments

• by GraffitiTim on 9/29/14, 8:49 PM

  False rumors are able to spread throughout a large population before being debunked. Corrections, however, are only really able to spread to people who previously saw the rumor. Furthermore, many people who shared the rumor may be less likely to share the correction, since it makes them look gullible for sharing the unverified rumor in the first place. So it's much harder for a correction to spread virally.

  If there were a system in place so that false rumors could be debunked in real-time, in-line (as opposed to using a separate retroactive correction), they would be less likely to spread as far. The closest thing I can think of would be something like Genius.

• by tokenadult on 9/29/14, 9:34 PM

  There is a lot of reaction to the headline here (hmm, maybe rumors spread through headlines), but I am curious about a new Web-based service mentioned in the article text, namely the service called Emergent.

  http://www.emergent.info/

  I saw another news report that was mostly but not entirely about Emergent the other day, and shared that story on my Facebook wall. Evidently the people who run Emergent are good at press relations.

  I post information about things like this on my Facebook wall because I try to be PREVENTIVE about rumors. I don't want rumors to be circulating among my friends. Both on Facebook and here on Hacker News, I try to post stories and articles about truth-finding and rationale thinking and about little known historical and scientific facts that can be used to examine commonplace rumors. Some of the postings appear to be ignored, but others appear to have some uptake and to prevent subsequent belief in the latest rumor going around. We can all do our part. We can enjoy working proactively to help one another think better and to know more facts and to practice more thoughtful examination of rumors.

• by mikestew on 9/29/14, 8:56 PM

  Rumors outrace truth, online or not; an observation allegedly made over 100 years ago by Mark Twain long before DARPA got a bright idea about networking: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” [0]

  [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/76-a-lie-can-travel-half-wa...

• by jgalt212 on 9/29/14, 9:27 PM

  False rumors spread fast because most of them are juicy or salacious. I bet boring rumors (true of false) don't spread at all.

  Try this one on for size:

  Dental studies show people who floss regularly have 3% less cavities than those who don't.

• by leepowers on 9/29/14, 11:18 PM

  For instance, the missing Libyan jetliner story has been shared more than 140,000 times despite being questioned by the respected rumor-tracking website Snopes ...... the Snopes page on the jetliner story has been shared only 735 times since it was revised to classify the rumor false, a small fraction of the circulation of articles endorsing the claim.

  This example shows the correction for a rumor is much less popular than the rumor itself. I'm not convinced that his shows that true stories are less popular or less engaging than rumors. It shows that people are more responsive to positive claims than negative ones.

  A stronger analysis would look at the top 100 shared/liked stories in a timeframe. Then determine the ratio of rumor to fact amongst this set of stories.

  Something else to consider: I read the article and did not question the factual basis of the claims made. Even gave it an uptick on HN. But I didn't check the sources, even though they are conveniently linked throughout the article. As far as I can tell, this makes me no different than the fella on Facebook who likes a story without checking it out. I'm doing as much work as he is. Right-leaning conspiracy theories feel right to him. Systemic cognitive biases that effect the masses (but surely not me!) feel right to me.

• by davidcbc on 9/29/14, 8:11 PM

  It seems to me that the obvious answer to the question of why rumors are spread more than truth is that spreading truth requires using enough effort to discover the truth and spreading rumors requires no such effort.

  It takes someone two seconds to click share on some garbage article, it takes another person a minute or two of Googling to see if something is true or not. Laziness is going to win out with more people than effort.