Once they had that, the researchers compared those results against the same users' reactions to false information—stuff that had been sent into their streams by satirical news sites or lie-spreading trolls. They then measured the timespan between the posting of that information's first comment and its last—a rough proxy for the collective attention paid to it. They wanted to see how long people engaged with information that was true ... and how long they engaged with information that was false.

Their findings will be, perhaps, unsurprising to anyone familiar with the discursive particularities of Facebook. Basically: The trueness or falseness of the content was largely irrelevant to the length of the conversation about it. The veracity of the information offered didn't seem to matter much when it came to how long people kept talking about it.

Here's what that looked like, charted:

The researchers found similar curves when they traced engagement patterns around the content—as manifested through Likes and comments:

Or, as the researchers summed it up:

Attention patterns are similar despite the different qualitative nature of the information, meaning that unsubstantiated claims (mainly conspiracy

theories) reverberate for as long as other information.

What they didn't track was the substance of these conversations; there's a chance that the Facebook users in question were spending all that time debunking the conspiracy theories in question. (But, you know: a chance.) The more salient point, though, is that they were dedicating their attention to those theories at all. They were allowing their time and their minds to be directed by misinformation, rumors, and lies. Which may be good news for your Uncle Stan and his various thoughts about the Kennedy assassination ... but bad news for the rest of us. How, then, do you start a conspiracy theory on Facebook? Throw a crazy idea out there, and see what happens.

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