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Could Fake News Alter the Outcome of the French Election?

Published on
22 Apr 2017
Written by
Robert Gorwa

Our research on the French election was covered by NBC News.

Ahead of the French election, voters are seeing fake news propagated by bots, spammers, and foreign operatives – but it’s still far less than Americans were exposed to during the 2016 presidential election. Just over 4 percent of political links about the French election being shared on Twitter are misinformation, according to a new study from Oxford University. The study, which analyzed roughly 842,000 tweets identified by a set of political hashtags during one week in March, also found professional news outlets were shared more often over the micro-blogging site than they were in parts of the United States during the 2016 election. “The takeaway is that people are sharing news of much better quality than in the U.S.,” the study’s principal author, Clementine Desigaud, told NBC News.

Read the full story here.

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