An Engineer Dies And...

An engineer died and reported to the pearly gates. An intern
angel, filling in for St. Peter, checked his dossier and grimly
said, "Ah, you're an engineer; you're in the wrong place."

So the engineer was cast down to the gates of hell and was let
in. Pretty soon, the engineer became gravely dissatisfied with
the level of comfort in hell, and began designing and building
improvements. After a while, the underworld had air conditioning,
flush toilets, and escalators, and the engineer was becoming a
pretty popular guy among the demons.

One day, God called Satan up on the telephone and asked with a
sneer, "So, how's it going down there in hell?"

Satan laughed and replied, "Hey, things are going great. We've
got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and
there's no telling what this engineer is going to come up with
next."

God's face clouded over and he exploded, "What? You've got an
engineer? That's a mistake; he should never have gotten down
there; send him up here."

Satan shook his head, "No way. I like having an engineer on the
staff, and I'm keeping him."

God was as mad as he had ever been, "This is not the way things
are supposed to work and you know it. Send him back up here or
I'll sue."

Satan laughed uproariously, "Yeah, right. And just where are YOU
going to get a lawyer?"

False or True?

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. The study, carried out at MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines, showed this by examining every tweet sent between 2006 and 2017. The researchers used statistical models to classify tweets as false or true, by applying data taken from six independent fact-checking organisations. That allowed them to categorise over 4.5m tweets about 126,000 different stories. Those stories were then ranked according to how they spread among Twitter’s users. The results were stark. False information was retweeted by more people than the true stuff, and faster to boot. True stories took, on average, six times longer than falsehoods to reach at least 1,500 people. Only about 0.1% of true stories were shared by more than 1,000 people, but 1% of false stories managed between 1,000 and 100,000 shares.

The reason false information does better than the true stuff is simple, say the researchers. Things spread through social networks because they are appealing, not because they are true. One way to make news appealing is to make it novel. Sure enough, when the researchers checked how novel a tweet was (by comparing it, statistically, with other tweets) they found false tweets were significantly more novel than the true ones. Untrue stories were also more likely to inspire emotions such as fear, disgust and surprise, whereas genuine ones provoked anticipation, sadness, joy and trust, leading to the rather depressing conclusion that people prefer to share stories that generate strong negative reactions. Perhaps not coincidentally, fake political news was the most likely to go viral. The paper also sheds some of the first peer-reviewed light on the impact of “bots”—automated accounts posing as real people. The idea that Russian bots in particular helped sway America’s presidential election has lodged itself firmly in the public consciousness. Yet the paper finds that, on Twitter at least, the presence of bots does not seem to boost the spread of falsehoods relative to truth.