Study: Trump supporters share most fake news

The people who share the most fake news tend to lean right politically — and many of them support President Trump, a new study has found.

University of Oxford researchers looked at who shared what on Facebook and Twitter in the three months before President Trump’s State of the Union address and found that Trump supporters shared the most misleading information more than the other groups in the study.

The Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) studied public social media posts from Oct. 20, 2017 to Jan. 18, 2018 among tens of thousands of users across the political spectrum, and checked to see who was sharing links and content from what they called “junk news sites.”

“On Twitter, the Trump Support Group shares 95% of the junk news sites on the watch list, and accounted for 55% of junk news traffic in the sample,” the researchers said. “Other kinds of audiences shared content from these junk news sources, but at much lower levels. On Facebook, the Hard Conservative Group shares 91% of the junk news sites on the watch list, and accounted for 58% of junk news traffic in the sample.”

The study looked at 13,477 Twitter users and 47,719 Facebook users and their sharing of news from sites such as Breitbart, Daily Caller, Hannity, Infowars and a few dozen other sites researchers say “deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news about politics, economics

or culture.”

The sites the researchers classified as junk news met at least three of the following five requirements: they have a lack of professionalism; their style is hyperbolic; they lack credibility; are extremely biased; and seem to run counterfeit sites mimicking professional media.

The study focused solely on sharing from the “junk news sites” and did not include a look at which news sites left-leaning groups were sharing, said Lisa-Maria Neudert, a doctor of philosophy candidate at Oxford and one of the study’s researchers, in response to an inquiry from SiliconBeat Tuesday.

The researchers classified Twitter users into groups such as “Trump supporters” or “Progressive movement” based on their “following and follower relationships,” and Facebook users into groups such as “Conspiracy” or “Hard Conservative” based on their “like” relationships.