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Twitter users spreading fake news targeted swing states in the run-up to Election Day

Published on
29 Sep 2017
Written by
Robert Gorwa

The project’s research on how polarizing information was distributed across Twitter in the lead up to the 2016 US election was covered in Business Insider.

A new study conducted by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project found that “low quality political information” and “ideologically extreme” junk news flooded 12 battleground states in the run-up to US Election Day, strategically targeting pivotal voters before and after November 8.

The study is the first to document on a large scale how propaganda and conspiratorial information was “strategically disseminated” throughout the country before the election. The researchers said they based their analysis on a dataset of 22,117,221 tweets collected November 1-11 that contained hashtags related to politics and came from users with traceable locations.

Read the full article here.

 

 

 

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