ACROSS the French countryside, in the summer of 1789, rumours swirled about vengeful aristocrats bent on the destruction of peasants' property. It was not true. The Great Fear, as it is now known, tipped France into revolution with a flurry of fact-free gossip and rumour. Two centuries later the methods for spreading nonsense are much improved. In the first paper of its kind, published in Science on March 8th, Soroush Vosoughi and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology present evidence that, on Twitter at least, false stories travel faster and farther than true ones.
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