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If it seems like fake news is everywhere, that may be because it is.

Falsehoods spread like wildfire on social media, getting quicker and longer-lasting pickup than the truth, researchers reported on Thursday.

A deep dive into Twitter shows that false news was re-tweeted more often than true news was, and carried further.

“Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information,” the team, led bySinan Aral of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in the journal Science.

“It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people.”

And it wasn’t bots spreading most of the falsehoods, they found. It was real people doing most of it. Usually ordinary people, too, they found: so-called ‘verified’ users and those with many followers were not usually the source of some of the most popular untrue viral posts.

No,the FDA did not say vaccines cause autism https://t.co/nXqotgRYQq — Maggie Fox (@maggiemfox) March 8, 2018

It might be because false statements sound more surprising, they said.

“We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information,” they wrote.

It should come as no surprise that the internet has spawned a resurgence of fake news. Congress and the FBI are investigating evidence that Russian and other foreign users deliberately flooded social media with untrue reports and posts intended to mislead people about political candidates.

And the term “fake news” has taken on its own life, referring not only to untrue reports but being increasingly used to dismiss reports that the user does not wish to agree with.

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So Aral’s team decided to use the term “false news” instead. They also used a broad definition of “news”. “We refer to any asserted claim made on Twitter as news,” they said.

The study started with PhD research by MIT’s Soroush Vosoughi, who was struck by the false reports that spread rapidly after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, in which three people were killed and 264 injured.

"Twitter became our main source of news," Vosoughi said in a statement. "I realized that ... a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumors,” he added.