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. CONT.
Andy Guess, Jonathan Nagler & Joshua Tucker, Monkey Cage