Truth decayWho Shares the Most Fake News?

Published 26 June 2020

Facebook is a more fertile breeding ground for fake news than Twitter, and those on the far ends of the liberal-conservative spectrum are most likely to share it, according to new research. “We found that certain types of people are disproportionally responsible for sharing the false, misleading, and hyper-partisan information on social media,” said the lead researcher. “If we can identify those types of users, maybe we can get a better grasp of why people do this and design interventions to stem the transfer of this harmful information.”

Facebook is a more fertile breeding ground for fake news than Twitter, and those on the far ends of the liberal-conservative spectrum are most likely to share it, according to new CU Boulder research.

The paper, in the journal Human Communication Research, also found that people who lack trust in conventional media, and in one another, post misinformation more often.

“We found that certain types of people are disproportionally responsible for sharing the false, misleading, and hyper-partisan information on social media,” said lead author Toby Hopp, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design. “If we can identify those types of users, maybe we can get a better grasp of why people do this and design interventions to stem the transfer of this harmful information.”

The paper comes at a time when, amid a global pandemic and contentious run-up to a presidential election, social media companies are grappling with how to curb so-called fake news.

In the past month, Twitter, Facebook and Google began labeling misleading, disputed or unverified posts about coronavirus, vowing to delete those that threaten public health. Twitter has also slapped labels on President Donald Trump’s tweets, dubbing them as inaccurate or glorifying violence. Trump responded by accusing Twitter of silencing conservative speech. Meanwhile, Facebook employees staged a virtual walk-out saying their company wasn’t doing enough to address suspect posts.

A disappearing gatekeeper

“A decade or two ago, traditional news organizations played a key gatekeeping role in determining what was true or not true,” said Hopp. “Now, with the proliferation of social media and with traditional news organizations under financial distress, there is a sea change occurring in the way that information flows through society.”

Previous research has shown that older adults and those who identify as Republican are more likely to share fake news. But Hopp wanted to go beyond demographic or political labels.

“We wanted to look at more nuanced factors indicating how these people see the world around them,” Hopp said.

Colorado says that to do so, his team recruited 783 regular Facebook and Twitter users over the age of 18 and, with their permission, collected and analyzed all of their posts for the period between August 1, 2015, and June 6, 2017 (before, during, and after the 2016 election). Participants also took a lengthy survey to assess their ideological conservatism vs. liberalism and identify how much they trusted friends, family and community members, and mainstream media.