Supersharers of fake news on Twitter.

Item request has been placed! ×
Item request cannot be made. ×
loading   Processing Request
Read More Add to Saved list
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
      X Corp.; FAKE news; UNITED States presidential election, 2020; SOCIAL democracy; OLDER people; SOCIAL media; VOTING registers
    • Abstract:
      Governments may have the capacity to flood social media with fake news, but little is known about the use of flooding by ordinary voters. In this work, we identify 2107 registered US voters who account for 80% of the fake news shared on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election by an entire panel of 664,391 voters. We found that supersharers were important members of the network, reaching a sizable 5.2% of registered voters on the platform. Supersharers had a significant over representation of women, older adults, and registered Republicans. Supersharers massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting. These findings highlight a vulnerability of social media for democracy, where a small group of people distort the political reality for many. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
    • Abstract:
      Copyright of Science is the property of American Association for the Advancement of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)