Who Shares the Most Fake News?
The researchers then looked at who shared content from 106 websites identified as fake news or “countermedia” sites by watchdog groups or legacy news organizations like NPR or U.S. News & World Report.
“Despite the fact that we tend to call it ‘fake’ news, a lot of this stuff is not completely false,” said Hopp, who prefers the term “countermedia.” “Rather, it is grossly biased, misleading and hyper-partisan, omitting important information.”
The good news: 71% of Facebook users and 95% of Twitter users shared no countermedia posts. The bad news: 1,152 pieces of fake news were shared via Facebook, with a single user responsible for 171. On Twitter, 128 pieces of countermedia were shared.
“We found that Facebook is the central conduit for the transfer of fake news,” said Hopp.
In the Facebook sample, those self-identified as extremely conservative—7 on a scale of 1 to 7—accounted for the most fake news shared, at 26%. In the Twitter sample, 32% of fake news shares came from those who scored a 7.
But those who scored a 1, identifying as extremely liberal, also shared fake news frequently, accounting for 17.5% of shares on Facebook and 16.4% on Twitter.
Fake news at the fringes
In all, about one-fifth of users at the far ideological extremes were responsible for sharing nearly half of the fake news on the two platforms.
“It is not just Republicans or just Democrats, but rather, people who are—left or right—more ideologically extreme,” said Hopp.
Those in the ideological middle and those with high levels of media and social trust were—generally speaking—the least likely to share fake news.
“People with high levels of social trust are more likely to compile online social networks comprised of diverse individuals, and this can hamper the spread of fake news,” said Hopp, noting that when a fellow user calls out a post as inaccurate, others may be less likely to share it. “If someone posts something that is incorrect, false or misleading, I don’t think it hurts for individual users to provide a factual rebuttal.”
The authors note that the sample is not necesarily representative of the general population of all social media users nationwide, and more research is necessary.
With several other papers in the works, the authors, including Assistant Professor of Journalism Pat Ferucci and Assistant Professor of Advertising Chris Vargo, hope to provide insight to lawmakers, companies and individual users hoping to stem the fake news tide.
“We can disagree, but when we have fundamentally different views about what information is true and what is not, democracy becomes very difficult to maintain,” said Hopp.
