A much-cited paper detailing the online spread of fake news has been retracted – because it turned out to be fake news.
In an embarrassing turn of events, in early January the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour issued a retraction notice for the study, which was published in June, 2017.
The paper was the work of a team of researchers headed by Xiaoyan Qiu from China's Shanghai Institute of Technology. It described a model approach that examined if the quality of information played a role in whether social media posts became popular.
The aim, the researchers stated, was to try to “explain the viral spread of low-quality information, such as the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”.
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