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Supersharers of fake news on Twitter

Science. 30 May 2024. Vol 384, Issue 6699. pp. 979-982. DOI: 10.1126/science.adl4435 – “Most fake news on Twitter (now X) is spread by an extremely small population called supersharers. They flood the platform and unequally distort political debates, but a clear demographic portrait of these users was not available. Baribi-Bartov et al. identified a meaningful sample of supersharers during the 2020 US presidential election and asked who they were, where they lived, and what strategies they used (see the Perspective by van der Linden and Kyrychenko). The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately 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 persistently retweeted misinformation manually. These insights are relevant for policymakers developing effective mitigation strategies to curtail misinformation. —Ekeoma Uzogara”

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