  Fake news that manipulates political elections, strikes financial systems,
and even incites riots is more viral than real news online, resulting in
unstable societies and buffeted democracy. The easier contagion of fake news
online can be causally explained by the greater anger it carries. The same
results in Twitter and Weibo indicate that this mechanism is independent of the
platform. Moreover, mutations in emotions like increasing anger will
progressively speed up the information spread. Specifically, increasing the
occupation of anger by 0.1 and reducing that of joy by 0.1 will produce nearly
6 more retweets in the Weibo dataset. Offline questionnaires reveal that anger
leads to more incentivized audiences in terms of anxiety management and
information sharing and accordingly makes fake news more contagious than real
news online. Cures such as tagging anger in social media could be implemented
to slow or prevent the contagion of fake news at the source.
