Solidarity 464, 14 March 2018

False news spreads on Twitter much faster than truth. Researchers at MIT have published the results of research into 126,000 fact-checkable stories tweeted or retweeted between 2006 and 2017 (bit.ly/false-t). True stories rarely reached more than 1000 people through retweeting; the top 1% of false-news tweet-cascades got to 10,000 or more. True reports took six times as long as falsehoods to reach 15,000 people. Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truths. This was not because false-news tweeters were generally more active than truth-tweeters. On the contrary, they were less...

Italy’s election (4 March) resulted in hung parliament, with no party getting enough votes to form a government. It will take weeks and maybe months for a government to emerge. The election highlighted in the most dramatic way the politically disastrous state of the country’s trade-union movement. The crisis of the reactionary centre-left government and the ruling Matteo Renzi-led Democratic Party (PD) has been consummated in an historic rejection by the mass of the Italian people; in a triumph for the two most virulent “anti-system” populist forces, rivals united in their anti-working class...