Few thoughts on an important paper that just appeared in Science, The spread of true and false news online. The paper received (and will receive) justified attention: it is massive (“~126,000 rumor cascades spread by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times” in a long temporal window – from 2006 to 2017), it includes several detailed analyses (the authors did not only check basic metrics such as speed and size of diffusion, but they measured things like structural virality; the proportion of political versus non-political news; the role of bots; they run a sentiment analysis of the tweets, etc.), and it has a straightforward (and I guess welcome to many) take-home message: “fake” news are more successfull than “true” news in social media, at least in Twitter (*).
Alberto Acerbi (old website) 