People are the principal culprits behind the spread of “fake news” on the Internet, according to a new study examining the flow of stories on Twitter. People, the study’s authors say, prefer false news; as a result, false news travels faster, farther, and deeper through the social network than factual news. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found those patterns applied to every subject they studied, including not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science, and technology. The researchers found false claims were 70 percent more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter; true stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people. In addition, the researchers said, it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.