Rumors are meant to be spread and with social networks like Facebook at our fingertips, what better way can there be to fan the flames? Before websites such as these and after snail mail felt too slow, you’d have to text the headline or send a email containing a link to the juicy tidbit to a bunch of pals. It’s a wholly different scenario with social networking portals since you can alert the hundreds of people to something important by just posting it to your page.
This sort of convenience does get misused more often than not by mortals like us who prick up our ears at the faintest whisper of a rumor. Facebook and Stanford University have been working to understand how content goes viral and how it can be dealt with. The researchers made use of Snope, a website which showcases memes and urban legends, to track how rumors behave.
The study indicates that stories which are true spread faster than false rumors, since more people were calculated to have re-shared veritable content. But the difference is not great enough to restore your faith in humanity as yet. Another thing that was observed is that rumors never ever die but keep resurfacing in bursts over time.
If you’re an individual or are working for an organization which has been dragged into a false story that went viral, just posting an update on your Facebook page might not be good enough. A better move would be to invalidate the rumor in the comments section because there are higher chances of the concerned post not being re-shared by others and the original sharer is likely to delete it too.
If you want to read all the minute details of the Facebook and Standford paper titled Rumor Cascades, you can follow this link to download it.