Majority Of Fake News Twitter Accounts From 2016 Election Still Around, Study Finds

Both Facebook and Twitter were roundly criticized during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election for allowing the widespread proliferation of “fake news.” Misleading or outright false news stories reached significant audiences, which some contend led to an under-informed electorate. New research from the Knight Foundation found that a majority of the offending accounts on Twitter are still active, nearly two years after the election.

The Knight Foundation used tools developed by social firm Graphika to examine the spread of fake news on Twitter. The study measured 10 million tweets from 700,000 accounts, both during and after the presidential election.

Knight found four million tweets linking to falsified news stories in March and April 2017 alone, well after the election. According to the study, a whopping 80 percent of the disinformation accounts are still alive and well, sharing more than one million tweets on a daily basis.

A significant portion of the accounts studied appeared to share stories automatically, rather than in tweets manually written by a human. Though the study examined links to more than 600 different news sources, more than half of the links shared on Twitter went to 10 larger sites.

Twitter has publicly committed to purging the site of spam and troll accounts in recent months. The site reported dwindling user numbers in its last earnings report, causing its stock price to fall. Earlier this week, Twitter announced new moderation policies aimed at ridding the site of automated spam accounts, specifically with upcoming elections in mind.

Twitter Trust and Safety VP Del Harvey told TechCrunch that Knight’s findings were not an accurate representation of fake news on the site. Since it was done using the site’s publicly available API, the study could not factor in accounts that were locked by the site’s moderators for posting spam. Twitter is a “real-time antidote” to fake news, according to Harvey.

“We are proud of this use case and work diligently to ensure we are showing people context and a diverse range of perspectives as they engage in civic debate and conversations on our service,” Harvey told TechCrunch.