Why does fake news travel faster than real news?

Recently I overheard a conversation, which was followed by a strong desire to begin drinking heavily.

A young man was trying to explain to someone that the flu season is actually a government conspiracy to depopulate the citizenry by releasing poison gases into the air from the chemtrail vapors of airplanes.

It had to be 5 o'clock somewhere.

Even more alarming, if a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study is to be believed, is that this young chap has plenty of company in believing all manner of fake news because it happened to be on social media.

MIT researchers analyzed 126,000 stories posted on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. Let us resist the snarky urge to suspect at least 125,000 of them came from Donald Trump.

The scholars concluded false stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true claims. The MIT study noted a fake news item on Twitter will spread throughout the cybersphere six times more quickly than the truth.

As one example, MIT noted that a true 2014 story about the fashion chain Zara's decision to recall a children's pajama line that resembled clothing worn by Nazi concentration camp prisoners took 7.3 hours to be retweeted 200 times. Yes, what were they thinking?

But a fake news story that Chick-Fil-A had begun a "We don't like blacks either!" campaign after the company's president had publicly opposed gay marriage hit the 200-retweet mark in just 4.2 hours.

MIT estimated true entries rarely are retweeted by more than 1,000 people, while fake news content can be retransmitted by as many at 100,000 twits.

Why is this?

We live in a society where the citizenry isn't particularly well-informed, preferring instead to live on a steady diet of talk show bloviators, conspiracy theorists on the internet and whatever slops over their Twitter feeds.

It also doesn't help that the current resident of the White House is an avid consumer and purveyor of fake news, tweeting out an endless stream of untruths from his earliest days of questioning Barack Obama's citizenship, to unproven claims of Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to wrongly insisting his inauguration was attended by the biggest crowds in the history of crowds -- and on and on and on …

It is one thing for some schmo sitting in his jammies somewhere to tweet the government is trying to murder the populace. Smiley face optional. It is quite another when the leader of the free world takes to his Twitter account to falsely claim that migrant Muslim youths beat up a Dutch boy on crutches.

Let's be fair. Lies and fake news are certainly more entertaining than the truth, although in this era of Stormy Daniels, Kim Jong Un and the field marshal of Mar-a-Lago, reality can certainly compete with fantasy.

One does have to wonder if all these phony tweets and other cyber disinformation efforts are merely exploiting a huge gap in our civic literacy, or perhaps our attention span.

The other day during my radio show on WMNF when the topic of Daniels arose, a caller echoed a growing meme that a double standard of morality was being waged against Trump's alleged association with a porn star because nothing of any consequence happened to President Bill Clinton in the wake of his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky.

That clunk listeners heard was the sound of a jaw dropping.

Apparently the House's vote to impeach Clinton after embarrassing hearings and then the Senate's narrow acquittal skipped the caller's mind. That's the problem with history -- so much to remember.

Just what long-lasting effect all this Twitter/social media hucksterism is having on the body politic isn't entirely clear.

While there will always be happy dupes who will believe fake news, it is also possible some people view the false items as merely a guilty pleasure, sort of like a learned art historian who secretly enjoys velvet Elvis paintings.

What we can conclude is that in truth there is empowerment, while propaganda is the long, bumpy road to tyranny -- one tweet at a time.