Sinan Aral - 2019 Vienna Conference

False news is big news. Barely a day goes by without a new development about the veracity of social media, foreign meddling in U.S. elections, or questionable science. Conducted with Soroush Vosoughi and Deb Roy of the MIT Media Lab, "The Spread of True and False News Online" investigates the differential diffusion of all the verified, true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise approximately 126,000 stories tweeted by about 3 million people over 4.5 million times. Until this study, few large-scale empirical investigations of the diffusion of false news or its social origins had existed. Their conclusions are both surprising and alarming.