Despite Maria Ressa’s Claims, Misinformation Doesn’t Travel Faster Than Fact
In May 2023, the Nobel Foundation hosted an annual Summit entitled “Truth, Trust and Hope.” Maria Ressa, a featured speaker at the event, expressed her concerns regarding the spread of misinformation online. “The system that connects us, all of them, spread lies faster than facts, six times faster. This is a 2018 MIT study,” she shared at the 2023 Summit, generally referring to social media companies. When the MIT study was originally published in 2018, The New York Times, AP, The Guardian, PBS, Washington Post, CBS, New York Post, NBC, and BBC all ran stories about the study, with headlines like “We finally know for sure that lies spread faster than the truth” and “Fake news 'travels faster', study finds.”
However, the original research study informing the conclusion features several errors. Firstly, an MIT research team classified “any assertion made on Twitter” as “news,” conflating common citizen speech with journalism. Then, the team selected stories from six popular fact-checking websites and tracked the spread of tweets related to the topics posted on them. This means that researchers only examined “misinformation” or “fake news” that was already viral, lacking a comparison on the number of lies that don’t have the same virality.
Moreover, the study’s authors insist their findings only reflect news on Twitter that has already been “fact-checked.” Even when the study was re-evaluated, speculation remained as to how far its findings could be generalized. Even if the study was perfect, it could never be applied to explain the public at large. Pew Research demonstrates only 23% of American adults use Twitter.
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