A person's heuristic biases lead to people believing the information.
Normative pressures in which people spread misinformation in order to gain social affirmation and acceptance: this relates to social identity theory 


University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Ackland, R., & Gwynn, K. (2020). Truth and the dynamics of news diffusion on Twitter. In R. Greifeneder, M. Jaffé, E. J. Newman, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), The psychology of fake news: Accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation (pp. 27–46). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429295379-4

Truth and the Dynamics of News Diffusion on Twitter

To investigate how one can deduce the truthfulness of information, and how exactly the spread of this information is affected by its truthfulness.

Main Idea

- reach (how many people are involved in the diffusion)
- speed
- breadth (how far does the news travel through the network, and what is the diversity of the actors involved in diffusion)


Key Measures of Diffusion

Characteristics of Credible Information Spread on Twitter:

•  Diffused through newer, more active accounts that have a lot of followers
•  Have more retweets
• Credible news spreads much slower, taking six times longer than fake news to spread to 1,500 people
•  Whereas fake rumors tends to resurface multiple times on Twitter, this does not occur with true rumors






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