ICA 2020

Sharing, Spamming, Sockpuppeting: Comparing the Twitter Dissemination Careers of News Articles from Mainstream and Suspect News Outlets

Axel Bruns, Tim Graham, Brenda Moon, Tobias R. Keller, and Dan Angus

• 20 May 2020 – International Communication Association conference, online

Comparisons of the diffusion of ‘true’ and ‘false’ news still suffer from deep methodological challenges. Vosoughi et al. report in Science (2018) that falsehoods spread faster than the truth, yet focus only on a narrow set of stories flagged by fact-checking organisations. We complement this by systematically comparing the typical dissemination careers on Twitter of articles from mainstream news organisations with articles from outlets on the Hoaxy meta-list of ‘fake news’ sites. This identifies human and automated behaviours that vary considerably between sites, and site types.

Video of the Presentation

Presentation Slides