[ad_1]
The false news and misinformation was a key tactic used by the Russians in the 2016 presidential election to try to convince voters against the candidates and sow mistruth and mistrust.
Now, just weeks before the mid-term elections of 2018, researchers say the situation is almost as bad.
Search Thursday by the Knight Foundation found that more than 80 percent of Twitter Accounts that repeated false information during the 2016 elections "are still active" and, in some cases, send more than a million tweets a day.
The foundation has reviewed more than 10 million tweets on 700,000 accounts linked to more than 600 sites associated with theories of misinformation and conspiracy. The researchers found that 6.6 million of these tweets were directly linked to fake news in the month leading up to the 2016 election and that four million tweets were broadcasting fake news six months after the election.
Even if it is a retreat, it's always more false news than anyone would want.
"Our democracy relies on access to reliable news and information," said Sam Gill, vice president of the Knight Foundation for Communities and Impact. "At the moment, the discussion about online misinformation is based on anxiety and conventional wisdom."
"That's not enough," he said.
Twitter spent the last year trying to clean the scene after the 2016 elections, after which lawmakers blamed the social media company for not doing more to protect voters from misinformation. The company, which has 330 million users, has eliminated tens of millions of accounts over the past year for disseminating false information and other suspicious content.
But even the CEO, Jack Dorsey admitted that Twitter had "not understood" how to eliminate the false news on the site.
Once reached, Del Harvey, Twitter's global vice president of trust and security, challenged the findings:
"First of all, this study was built using our public API and therefore does not take into account any of the actions we take to remove content and automated or spammed accounts from user consultation. on Twitter. We do it proactively and on a large scale, every day. Secondly, as a single open service, Twitter is a vital source of antidote in real-time to everyday lies. We are proud of this use case and work diligently to ensure that we show the context and diverse perspectives of people when they participate in the civic debate and conversations about our service. "
The Knight Foundation criticized Twitter for claiming that it was repressing automated and "spammed" accounts, and stated that "so many easily identifiable abusive accounts are difficult to reconcile with effective crackdowns" .
According to their findings, the researchers said the accounts were closely related by following each other, which was described as a "supercluster of misinformation". .
"The core of this network remains very active at the time of this report," the researchers said. "Before and after the elections, most of the Twitter links to false information are concentrated on a few dozen sites, and these fake and conspiracy sites are largely stable."
"Reducing the audience on the social networks of dozens of fake and conspiracy sites could significantly reduce the number of false news on Twitter," they concluded.
Source link
