Abstract
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets, from 2.2 million users, which contain a link to news outlets. Based on a classification of news outlets curated by www.opensources.co, we find that 25% of these tweets spread either fake or extremely biased news. We characterize the networks of information flow to find the most influential spreaders of fake and traditional news and use causal modeling to uncover how fake news influenced the presidential election. We find that, while top influencers spreading traditional center and left leaning news largely influence the activity of Clinton supporters, this causality is reversed for the fake news: the activity of Trump supporters influences the dynamics of the top fake news spreaders.
Highlights
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified
They classify websites by analyzing several aspects, such as if they try to imitate existing reliable websites, if they were flagged by fact-checking groups, or by analyzing the sources cited in articles
We discard insignificant outlets accumulating less than 1% of the total number of tweets in their category
Summary
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. We characterize the networks of information flow to find the most influential spreaders of fake and traditional news and use causal modeling to uncover how fake news influenced the presidential election. Found that, during the 2016 US presidential election on Twitter, bots were responsible for the early promotion of misinformation, that they targeted influential users through replies and mentions[26] and that the sharing of fact-checking articles nearly disappears in the core of the network, while social bots proliferate[13]. The top spreaders of center and left leaning news outlets, who are mainly journalists, are the main drivers of Twitter’s activity and in particular of Clinton supporters’ activity, who represent the majority in Twitter[27]. We find that it is the activity of Trump supporters that governs their dynamics and top spreaders of fake news are merely following it
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