Be wary if you're getting your news via Twitter: researchers have revealed 25% of tweets contain false information.
That stat is via researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who gathered up 60 million tweets last year, first analysing them via software before handing them to a crowdsourcing site to be double-checked for accuracy.
Even with spam messages filtered out, the researchers revealed that a quarter couldn't be verified.
According to a report in New Scientist, the biggest single piece of misinformation last year was a hoax around Ebola, saying people were coming back from the dead as zombies.
The millions of sorted tweets have been inputted into a database called CREDBANK. The researchers, Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert, have opened up access to the database, hoping to improve its ability to judge tweets' veracity, as well as to allow developers to make apps using the data.
That will hopefully make it easier to fact check Twitter and reduce the number of misinformed users by putting a stop to hoaxes before they spread.
