Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election

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....

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bovet, Alexandre, Makse, Hernán A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6315042/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30602729
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07761-2
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author Bovet, Alexandre
Makse, Hernán A.
author_facet Bovet, Alexandre
Makse, Hernán A.
author_sort Bovet, Alexandre
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-63150422019-01-04 Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election Bovet, Alexandre Makse, Hernán A. Nat Commun Article 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. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-01-02 /pmc/articles/PMC6315042/ /pubmed/30602729 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07761-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Bovet, Alexandre
Makse, Hernán A.
Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
title Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
title_full Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
title_fullStr Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
title_full_unstemmed Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
title_short Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
title_sort influence of fake news in twitter during the 2016 us presidential election
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6315042/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30602729
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07761-2
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