Fake News is Widely Shared as the Real Thing

Our research into the 2016 US election was covered by the Financial Times.

Nearly a quarter of web content shared on Twitter by users in the battleground state of Michigan during the final days of last year’s US election campaign was so-called fake news, according to a University of Oxford study. Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) also determined that these users shared approximately as many fake news items as “professional news” over the same period.

“I think it’s safe to say that’s a bad thing for public life and the political conversation in [Michigan],” said Professor Philip Howard, principal investigator with the Project on Computational Propaganda at OII.

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