Journal article
Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-018-07761-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Research
- Journal:
- Nature communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 7
- Publication date:
- 2019-01-02
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-11-19
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pmid:
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30602729
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- Pubs id:
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1109489
- Local pid:
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pubs:1109489
- Deposit date:
-
2020-06-08
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Bovet and Makse
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2019 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/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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