What a stupid headline.

"So who are these people? They're a bit more likely to be female. While both the comparison groups were roughly evenly split between male and female, the superspreaders were 60 percent female. They're also older, on average 58 years old, nearly 20 years older than the sample as a whole."

So the term "old wives' tale" is still holds up?

I can clearly see this around me.

Not only women, but also elder men, who are really educated but lose their lucidity in front of fake news on the web. I guess it’s also because they come from a time where you were not swimming in fake news.

And sometimes, even if they think it might be fake news, they just send it to you to get your opinion on it.

Out of 650,000

just 2,107 accounts that are responsible for 80 percent of the tweets linking to sources of misinformation.

What the fuck?

There's this expression, it refers to a piece of information that is often spread as wisdom but has no basis in fact or truth, that expression is "old wives tale."

Old wives be trippin'.

That is why my parents are not allowed to be on social media. I mean, they choose not to be, but also I'd like to forbid them from ever making an account. That way they get their news from the TV, which is alright. It's not even remotely close to American Television.

AND the wives of supreme court justices!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.

While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.

The work, done by Sahar Baribi-Bartov, Briony Swire-Thompson, and Nir Grinberg, relies on a panel of over 650,000 Twitter accounts that have been associated with voting registrations in the US, using full names and location information.

The researchers first identified tweets made by these users, which contain political content, using a machine-learning classifier that had previously been validated by having its calls checked by humans.

From this population, Baribi-Bartov, Swire-Thompson, and Grinberg identify just 2,107 accounts that are responsible for 80 percent of the tweets linking to sources of misinformation.

For the analyses they perform, the superspreaders are compared to a random sample of the total population and the heaviest sharers of links to reliable news sources.

The original article contains 472 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I believe this, but it’s also LOTS of men too