GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A study done at London’s Oxford University took a look at election-related posts on social media Goliath Twitter and found that a big chunk of campaign-related news shared in Michigan was of the fake news variety.
Researchers at Oxford say they started out with 22 million tweets posted between Nov. 1 and Nov. 11 by people who self-identified as living in Michigan. They were then able to narrow down those tweets to election-related by looking for keywords like the names of the candidates or campaign-related slogans and hashtags like “make America great again” or “I’m with her.” They then divided those tweets up by content, deciding which were purporting to share news.
“We’re only talking about when people were sharing links, so if they put, ‘Love her, Hillary Clinton,’ it doesn’t go in. This is only when people are sharing links to other information,” said Gillian Bolsover, an Oxford Internet Institute researcher and one of the authors of the study released last week.
She and her colleagues found that fake news accounted for a quarter of the campaign-related links shared, equal to and often exceeding the links shared from legitimate news sources.
“These are not things that adhere to the professional standards of journalistic reporting,” Bolsover said.
Bolsover said sources like NBC News, The New York Times and Fox News are examples of legitimate sources.
“But in the days sort of right before the election, the proportion that was professional news dropped,” Bolsover said.
Infowars, Breitbart and Truthfeed are cited by report authors as junk or “fake news” sites.
“They’ll often use these techniques that we’ve seen in sort of propaganda, persuasion and advertising techniques,” Bolsover said.
The study gives a glimpse into what was going on in the election via a major social media platform.
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