World Bulletin / News Desk

An American journalist and researcher has developed a took that tracks the spread of false rumors online.

Craig Silverman, a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, developed Emergent to track data that shows how unverified claims are spread all over social media.

Looking at a range of rumors that have been spread online, the tool found that false news stories spread much more than the official story, even if they are less in number and have been proven to be hoaxes.

In some cases, true news stories only get shared a third as much as the hoax versions, the New York Times revealed in a report published on September 29.

In one case, a report that denied US jetliners had been taken by militants in Libya was shared only 735 times compared to the hoax story which was shared 188,000 times.