2024-06-03 04:00:12
The majority of misinformation tweets come from a surprisingly small percentage of users. This discovery, made by a team of social media researchers at Indiana University, raises crucial questions about the influence and spread of misinformation online.
Published in PLOS ONEthe study analyzed 2,397,388 tweets flagged for low credibility. The researchers found that a small name accounts were responsible for the diffusion massive of disinformationhighlighting the central role of “super-spreaders”.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X) and Instagram have a major impact on personal beliefs and social issues, including politics. Foreign entities use these platforms to influence public opinion, a phenomenon studied by many researchers.
The team collected data from Twitter for ten months, totaling nearly 2.4 million tweets, and identified those containing low-credibility information. They found that a third of the questionable tweets came from just 10 accounts, and that 1,000 accounts were responsible for 70% of these tweets.
These super-spreaders are comparable to the super-contaminators of the pandemic, able to “infect” a large number of people thanks to their reputation. Although the majority of the accounts are not identifiable, some, such as famous politicians or influencers such as Donald Trump Jr., have been mentioned.
Classification of super-spreader accounts. A large portion (55.1%) of the accounts are no longer active. For each class annotated with political affiliations, the colors indicate the ideological distribution. The last group aggregates all accounts with political affiliations.
Credit: PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302201
Most of the identified accounts were disabled during a 2020 campaign by Twitter to reduce misinformation. However, that trend has been reversing since the control of the platform by Elon Musk and his change of identity to X.
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