A study of 126,000 rumours and false news stories spread on Twitter over a period of 11 years found that they travelled faster and reached more people than the truth.
一项针对11年来在推特上传播的12.6万个谣言和虚假新闻报道的研究发现，假新闻传播速度更快，其受众比真相的受众要多。
The most common subject matter was false political news. Other popular topics included urban legends, business, terrorism, science, entertainment and natural disasters.
最常见的主题是虚假的政治新闻。其他热门话题包括城市传说、商业、恐怖主义、科学、娱乐和自然灾害等。
Twitter provided its data for the research. The firm told the BBC that it is already engaged with trying to devise a "health check" to measure its contribution to public conversation.
推特为该研究提供了数据。该公司向BBC透露，他们已经开始尝试设计一个“健康检查”来衡量其对公众对话的贡献。
"False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information," said Professor Sinan Aral, one of the study’s co-authors.
该研究的共同作者之一的希南·阿拉尔教授表示：“虚假新闻更新颖，而人们更可能分享新颖的信息。”
While the team did not conclude that novelty on its own caused the re-tweets, they said false news tended to be more surprising than real news, which may make it more likely to be shared.
尽管该团队没有得出新颖性本身导致转发的结论，但他们认为虚假新闻比真实新闻更令人惊讶，这可能会使其更容易被分享。

Prof Aral, Soroush Vosoughi and associate professor Deb Roy began their research in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing in 2013.
在2013年波士顿马拉松爆炸事件后，阿拉尔教授、索罗什·沃索基教授和德布·罗伊副教授开始了他们的研究。
"Twitter became our main source of news," said Dr Vosoughi. "I realized that … a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumours; it was false news."
沃索基博士称：“推特成了我们的主要新闻来源。我意识到...我在社交媒体上阅读的大部分内容都是谣言，是虚假新闻。”
The team used six independent fact-checking sources, including Snopes and Urbanlegend, to identify whether the stories in the study were genuine.
该团队使用了六个独立的事实核查来源，包括Snopes和Urbanlegend，以确定其研究的故事是否真实。
Their findings, published in the journal Science, included:
他们的研究发现发表在《科学》杂志上，其中包括：
False news stories were 70% more likely to be re-tweeted than true stories. It took true stories around six times longer to reach 1,500 people. True stories were rarely shared beyond 1,000 people, but the most popular false news could reach up to 100,000.
假新闻报道的转发率比真实报道的可能高出70%。真实故事要达到1500名受众，需要的时间（比假新闻）多了六倍。真实故事很少有超过1000人分享，但最受欢迎的虚假新闻可能会达到100000名受众。