SCIENTISTS FIND THAT A TINY PROPORTION OF PEOPLE SPREAD ALMOST ALL THE FAKE NEWS, THE RESULTS ARE NOT SURPRISING
This article was authored by a 3rd party not related to PlanetVoters.com and any opinions or views expressed are not a reflection of PlanetVoters.com.
JUNE 5, 2024
A new study shows that a minuscule subset of “supersharers” spread the overwhelming majority of fake news on social media during the 2020 election cycle. The average supersharer profile, according to the research? Older, white, conservative, and incredibly online women in red states. Cue the gasp!
The study, published this week in the journal Science, analyzed data from the accounts of 660,000 verifiably real, US-based voters on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Of these hundreds of thousands of American netizens, the researchers — a team comprising American and Israeli scientists — were able to determine that only about 2,000 users were responsible for sharing a whopping 80 percent of misinformation that spread during the 2020 election.
When the researchers examined the voter registration information attributed to the supersharers, a clear pattern emerged: they were disproportionately likely to be middle-aged-to-older white women with an average age of 58; they were also primarily Republican and lived in conservative states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona.
These users aren’t just active, either. Per the journal’s writeup, more than one in every 20 X users examined for the study were following these accounts, meaning that these supersharers are punching way above their weight in terms of reach. (The study builds on an earlier 2019 study from many of the same researchers, which found similar supersharer results when analyzing the 2016 election cycle.)
To read the full article, click here:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/tiny-proportion-of-people-spread-fake-news
