A new study has identified a small group of «super spreaders» of fakes on Twitter — they make up only 0.3% of accounts on the social network, but spread about 80% of links with disinformation. One might expect that these are young people who actively use the Internet, but not so — 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. The researchers first identified tweets from 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 ultimately 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 shared links was not verified.
Further, from this set identified 2107 accounts (about 0.3% of the total) responsible for 80% of tweets with links to disinformation sources — so-called «superpropagators» 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. Ultimately, the majority of these links were shared by «super-sharers» for two reasons: first, they shared more links to news 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 superproliferatorand their tweets received more replies, retweets, and likes than others. The analysis also estimated that super-propagators accounted for about a quarter of the links to disinformation sites that their typical followers accessed. For more than 10% of their followers, 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 super-peddlers were registered Republicans (almost 20% were registered as Democrats).
Most of the super-spreaders’ activity was in the form of retweets — about three-quarters of the content.
Source: Ars Technica