Fake news spreads much faster and penetrates far deeper than real news because “humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it,” according to a recent study by MIT. It’s the first research of its kind, examining tweets from nearly all throughout Twitter’s existence.

Tweets with falsehoods do better than true ones for several reasons. They’re eye-catching: “fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news,” writes The Atlantic. Secondly, fake tweets generate intense emotions like surprise and disgust.

“The massive differences in how true and false news spreads on Twitter cannot be explained by the presence of bots,” said Sinan Aral, one of the researchers involved. They found that bots retweeted fake news “at the same rate that they retweeted accurate information.”

Though the researchers only studied Twitter, Aral says that his “intuition is that these findings are broadly applicable to social-media platforms in general. You could run this exact same study if you worked with Facebook’s data.”

Read the whole article in The Atlantic here.