Twitter users are twice as likely to retweet fake news stories than authentic ones

President Obama was not injured in a White House explosion in April 2013. The explosion never happened. But according to users on Twitter, it did. 

A fake news tweet had been sent out from a hijacked Associated Press account. The news spread rapidly, so much so, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted by 100 points.

The retweet is powerful. It facilitates the rapid spread of news — whether a story is completely bogus or real. And according to MIT research published Thursday in the journal Science, false news is 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real news stories.

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