Supersharers of Fake News on Twitter

> The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas

Unstoppable force there

> Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, which are focus points of contentious abortion and immigration battles. Their neighborhoods were poorly educated but relatively high in income. Supersharers’ massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting.

This kind of people existed for a long time. Before social media, I attended university with a few women who preached religious conservative ideals. The stories were so "off" that the campus chaplains pointed out that the stories (now called fake news) weren't charitable.

After graduation, they worked minimum-paid jobs for a few years, married, became homemakers and have 5+ children. They were super active on social media, so I thought, "Why do you have so much time on hand?" In addition, living in the conservative states must be so cheap or they were so wealthy that there's only one breadwinner in the household.

We aren't in touch anymore.

Facebook outages must be hard on them.

I wonder how people would feel if the races were reversed:

"The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Democrat, middle-aged Black women residing in three liberal states, California, New York, and Minnesota, which are focus points of contentious anti-policing and gun control battles."

> Similar to prior work, we rely on a source-level definition of fake news as domains that portray as legitimate news outlets but do not have the “editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information.” We rely on the manually labeled list of fake news sites by Grinberg et al., updated using NewsGuard ratings, and demonstrate the robustness of the findings to different operationalizations.

They don't define fake news as news that is wrong or intentionally deceptive, but by a blacklist of outlets they define as fake news outlets, or rather have been defined that way by a weird company.

> NewsGuard approved sites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed. Sites labeled as unreliable include InfoWars, the Daily Kos, Sputnik, RT, WikiLeaks, and Fox News. NewsGuard's founders cautioned that its "Nutrition Label" should not be treated as an endorsement equivalent to the nutrition facts label from the Food and Drug Administration.

> Sites that had previously ignored the extension, such as MailOnline, objected to being listed as unreliable. The decision to list MailOnline as unreliable was reversed, and NewsGuard admitted they were wrong on some counts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsGuard

edit: i.e. they've used "science" to detect that upper-middle aged women share a lot of articles on social media (we used to refer to them as aunts), and that people in Arizona, Florida, and Texas are conservative.

Why was this flagged? @dang

things get suppressed here so easily

Lists, people - LISTS.

Old people? Noooooooo

It all depends on what you define as "fake news" doesn't it? How about in that same time frame "51 Intelligence Experts Say Hunter's Laptop is Russian Disinformation" or "Trump will release an untested vaccine to boost his election chances," were those factored into the study? I kinda suspect they weren't.

> The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas

But where do the supersharers of true news live? California and San Francisco I guess...