If you get your news from Twitter, beware: False stories are 70 percent more likely than true ones to be shared on the social media platform, according to a recent study. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed 126,000 news stories tweeted by 3 million users over a 10-year period. They found that legitimate news stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the most popular fake news stories were routinely shared up to 100,000 times. Computer bots—automated Twitter accounts programmed to spread false stories—are often blamed for helping fake news go viral, but the M.I.T. researchers used software to weed out bots, and the results were essentially the same. Experts say that’s a clear indication that people—and not just computers—are responsible for the rise of fake news. “Fake news is designed to be shocking and to get attention,” says Pat Winters Lauro, a media professor at Kean University in New Jersey. “In our polarized society, people want to share stories that validate their opinions, whether it’s real news or not.”