Study shows that elderly women are the most likely to spread fake news on Twitter
A new study has identified a small group of “super spreaders” of fake news on Twitter – they account for only 0.3% of accounts on the social network, but spread about 80% of links with disinformation. One would expect that these are young people who actively use the Internet, but no – it turns out that most fakes are spread by older people, and they are usually women.
The study relied on a panel of more than 650,000 Twitter accounts associated with voter registration in the United States – using full names and location information that was linked to the average demographics of a given electoral district. First, the researchers identified tweets by users with political content using machine learning, and then checked their posts for links to sites on the list of “sources of persistent disinformation.”
The results were eventually published with a few caveats – the researchers cannot confirm whether the voter in question had full control (or any control) over their account during the election season, and the accuracy of individual stories behind the links shared was not verified.
Further, from this set, 2107 accounts (about 0.3% of the total) were identified, responsible for 80% of tweets with links to sources of disinformation – the so-called “super-spreaders” of fakes.
On an average day on Twitter at the time, only 7% of the news shared contained links to sites that were prone to publishing disinformation. In the end, most of them were shared by “super-sharers” for two reasons: first, they shared more news links than anyone else (16 per day on average) and were also more likely to rely on fake news sources, which accounted for 18% of their links.
The researchers found that more than 5% of all accounts followed at least one super influencer, and their tweets received more replies, retweets, and likes than the rest. The analysis also calculated that super-propagators accounted for about a quarter of the links to disinformation sites accessed by their typical followers. For more than 10% of their subscribers, they were the only source of fake news.
These super-distributors were somewhat more likely to be female – 60%, and their average age was 58. Although most of the disinformation about the election was spread mainly in Republican circles, only 64% of the super-propagandists were registered Republicans (almost 20% were registered as Democrats).
Most of the activity of super-sharers was in the form of retweets – about three-quarters of the content.
