this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Among those who shared any political content on Twitter during the election, fewer than 5% of people on the left or in the center ever shared any fake news content, yet 11 and 21% of people on the right and extreme right did

Grinberg, N., Joseph, K., Friedland, L., Swire-Thompson, B., & Lazer, D. (2019). Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Science, 363(6425), 374–378. doi:10.1126/science.aau2706

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Also worth noting that the X axis is growing by orders of magnitude and not linearly.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Did my best with the information I had. Which was basically only the graph itself.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Isn't this "Who is exposed to fake news sources", not "who shared fake news sources"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Yes, the irony if mislabelling data about misinformation is fun

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

This is just referring to completely fabricated stories right? I assume very biased stories are a lot more common.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure does look like gullibility is a factor in politics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

George Soros told you to say that didn’t he?!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What are "superconsumers" and "supersharers?" Are those politically neutral terms, or are they further extentions to the right like the graphs seem to imply?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yes, they are suspected right-wing bots separated from the data-set based on a set of criteria that marks them as outliers.

The “supersharers” and “superconsumers” of fake news sources—those accountable for 80% of fake news sharing or exposure—dwarfed typical users in their affinity for fake news sources and, furthermore, in most measures of activity. For example, on average per day, the median super- sharer of fake news (SS-F) tweeted 71.0 times, whereas the median panel member tweeted only 0.1 times. The median SS-F also shared an average of 7.6 political URLs per day, of which 1.7 were from fake news sources. Similarly, the median superconsumer of fake news sources had almost 4700 daily exposures to political URLs, as compared with only 49 for the median panel member (additional statistics in SM S.9). The SS-F members even stood out among the overall supersharers and superconsumers, the most politically active accounts in the panel (Fig. 2). Given the high volume of posts shared or consumed by superspreaders of fake news, as well as indicators that some tweets were authored by apps, we find it likely that many of these accounts were cyborgs: partially automated accounts controlled by humans (15) (SM S.8 and S.9). Their tweets included some self-authored content, such as personal commentary or photos, but also a large volume of political re-tweets. For subsequent analyses, we set aside the supersharer and superconsumer outlier accounts and focused on the remaining 99% of the panel.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Who is determining what is and isn't fake news?

I'd check the paper, but it's paywalled

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Sounds like fake news to me. /s