archive | (Science publishing date: 30 May 2024)

A mere 2000 or so “supersharers” spread 80% of content from fake news sites in a sample of more than 600,000 U.S. voters on X (formerly Twitter), according to an analysis published today in Science. The posters were more likely to be women and older—challenging the stereotype of social media manipulators as young, alt-right men—and they had a huge reach: More than one in 20 users in the data set followed at least one of these supersharers.

“It does not seem like supersharing is a one-off attempt to influence elections by tech-savvy individuals,” Grinberg adds, “but rather a longer term corrosive socio-technical process that contaminates the information ecosystem for some part of society.”