Oh look, Facebook is giving away $10 000 to some lucky folk who share a post.

Hey, you can win a free car here – just type in your preferred colour.

How about a free air ticket to a destination of your choice – just send this link to everyone in your WhatsApp contact list.

Yeah, you’ve either been one of the people who share this stuff or you’ve seen it going on – all scams, if you bother to do about three seconds of research.

Then there’s the spread of fake news, and sadly the situation is even worse than researchers at MIT first thought. The largest ever study of how fake news spreads, published yesterday, is a damning indictment of how we use social media.

This from the Atlantic:

The massive new study analyzes [sic] every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor.

By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

The Atlantic’s look inside that MIT study is in-depth and intense, so if you’re intrigued you can read more here.

You’d like to think that this may bring on some degree of introspection from Twitter users, but you wouldn’t bet on it.