Jad Abumrad

Where things get, you know, shouted down and shamed and shouted down and shamed or spread and and celebrated.

And the amazing thing about Twitter is that you can see that happen.

There's real data there about retweets and likes and whatever else that you could actually use it to test Holmes' idea.

Like, does the truth, do the good ideas actually rise to the top?

Sinan Aral, professor, MIT.

A couple of years ago, he and some of his colleagues at MIT, they took a quantitative look at this exact question, like how do truths and falsehoods fare in the marketplace of Twitter?

They started by gathering up stories from a couple of fact-checking websites.

And they found for each story, the first tweet.

Basically, it's entry into the marketplace.

And so for each story, they ended up with a diagram that showed how it spread through the Twitterverse.

And the height and width of each tree would tell you how far and wide the information spread.

Tons of people retweeting the original tweet, then tons more people retweeting those retweets.

Lots of branches.

And Sinan says that when they analyzed and compared the breadth and the depth and the speed of growth of all those different tree diagrams...

That's part of what we reported back in 2021.

And listening back now, the way we were talking about it then feels almost quaint.

Now that the platforms themselves have become more political, with the rise of better and easier to make deepfakes, and we just had the release of Sora 2, it's like we're in this whole new, more complicated phase of misinformation online.

But I do think, even given all of that,

This next conversation that I'm about to play for you from the same episode totally holds up.

It reframes the conversation about truth and free speech, which I think is half the battle to finding a way out of this mess.