The majority of disinformation tweets originate from an astonishingly small percentage of users. This discovery, made by a team of social media researchers from Indiana University, raises crucial questions about the influence and spread of false information online.
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Published in
PLOS ONE, the study analyzed 2,397,388 tweets flagged for their low credibility. Researchers found that a small number of accounts were responsible for the massive spread of disinformation, highlighting the central role of "super-spreaders."
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), and Instagram have a significant impact on personal beliefs and social issues, particularly political ones. Foreign entities use these platforms to influence public opinion, a phenomenon studied by many researchers.
The team collected data on Twitter for ten months, totaling nearly 2.4 million tweets, and identified those containing low credibility information. They found that one-third of the dubious tweets came from only 10 accounts and that 1,000 accounts were responsible for 70% of these tweets.
These super-spreaders are comparable to pandemic super-spreaders, capable of "infecting" a large number of people through their reputation. Although most accounts were not identifiable, some, such as politicians or famous influencers like Donald Trump Jr., were mentioned.
Classification of super-spreader accounts. A large portion (55.1%) of accounts are no longer active.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 deactivated during Twitter's 2020 campaign to reduce disinformation. However, this trend has been reversing since Elon Musk took over the platform and rebranded it as X.