Supersharers of fake news on Twitter

Abstract

Governments may have the capacity to flood social media with fake news, but little is known about the use of flooding by ordinary voters. In this work, we identify 2107 registered US voters who account for 80% of the fake news shared on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election by an entire panel of 664,391 voters. We found that supersharers were important members of the network, reaching a sizable 5.2% of registered voters on the platform. Supersharers had a significant overrepresentation of women, older adults, and registered Republicans. Supersharers’ massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting. These findings highlight a vulnerability of social media for democracy, where a small group of people distort the political reality for many.

Quantifying the vulnerabilities of the online public square to adversarial manipulation tactics

“…We also examine network vulnerabilities that may amplify the effects of manipulation, and evaluate the overall information quality as a result of different malicious tactics. We focus on four well-documented tactics commonly employed in influence operations across various platforms ( 36 ): (i) infiltrating a community, for example through social bots ( 6 , 37 ), follow trains ( 38 ), or by impersonating news outlets ( 36 , 37 ); (ii) generating deceptively appealing content, such as novel narratives ( 9 ) or emotional messages ( 39 ); (iii) flooding the network with high volumes of content by posting at high frequency to artificially inflate popularity/engagement indicators ( 8 , 37 , 40 ), and possibly deleting content to avoid detection ( 41 ); and (iv) targeting specific users, such as influential ( 8 ) or vulnerable individuals ( 6 ). Insights from analyzes of these tactics are instrumental in developing countermeasures to increase the resilience of social media and their users against manipulation.…”