Analysis | Who shared fake news during the 2016 election campaign? You’ll be surprised.

Analysis | Who shared fake news during the 2016 election campaign? You’ll be surprised.
ppinclude, fake news, social media, facebook, FB, #fakenews, Trump, baby boomers,
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By Andy Guess , Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker Joshua Tucker Email Bio Follow January 9 at 2:00 PM A Facebook logo in Paris. (Thibault Camus/AP) This week, the New York Times broke the news that Democratic activists posted misleading Facebook pages and Twitter feeds during the 2017 U.S. Senate race in Alabama. That’s just the latest iteration in the ongoing saga of online disinformation and “fake news” since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Researchers have learned a lot about fake news - who produced the content, who encountered it, who may have believed it and how to counteract it. Now we know a bit more about who actually shared it. In research we are publishing today in the journal Science Advances, we find that in general, the proportion of people on Facebook who shared links to fake news websites was relatively low. That said, however, older Americans - especially those over 65 - were much more likely to share fake news than younger ones, and conservatives and Republicans were more likely to share fake news than were liberals and Democrats. [This explains how social media can both weaken - and strengthen - democracy] How we did our research With support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab at New York University commissioned a panel survey during the 2016 U.S. election campaign. After the election, respondents were asked whether they were willing to share information about their available timeline posts on Facebook, including external links they had posted on their profiles. About 1,300 respondents agreed to share this information using a Facebook app developed by the SMaPP Lab and approved by Facebook for research purposes. Because these respondents had previously answered our survey questions, we also had data on their age, ideology, self-reported partisan identification, and so on. Those who agreed to share were somewhat more Democratic (40 percent vs. 32 percent) than the full population of those who reported having a Facebook account, but they were very similar to those who did not share in terms of age, education and likelihood of casting a vote. We then compared links shared by the respondents to several lists of Internet domains known to be purveyors of “fake news,” relying mainly on a list compiled by Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed News. But we also checked for sites listed by other peer-reviewed research, those listed on a crowdsourced effort to compile dubious information sources and those among a list of specifically debunked articles. Not that many people shared fake news According to our data, fewer than 1 in 10, or 8.5 percent, of our respondents shared links from fake news domains. (For comparison, about 1 in 4 Americans during the last weeks of the 2016 campaign read or clicked on at least one fake news article, regardless of how they encountered it.) Most people who did share links to articles on fake news domains did not share many of them. But, li