The following article by Ben Guarino was posted on the Washington Post website March 8, 2018:
A tweet can wreak havoc in a few hundred characters, as demonstrated in April 2013 when someone hacked the Associated Press Twitter account and claimed that explosions at the White House had injured President Barack Obama. There were no explosions — and Obama was fine — but the Dow Jones average sank by 100 points in two minutes. Stock markets swiftly recovered once the truth came out. Twitter, however, remained a breeding pool for false information.
Some of Twitter’s rumors are true. The discovery of the Higgs boson leaked through Twitter before its official announcement in 2012. Others, of course, are false and far more pernicious, such as conspiracy theories about the recent high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Continue reading “Fake news spreads ‘farther, faster, deeper’ than truth, study finds”