COVID-19 Fake News on Twitter
David Lazer, Damian J. Ruck, Alexi Quintana, Sarah Shugars, Kenneth Joseph, Nir Grinberg, Ryan J. Gallagher, Luke Horgan, Adina Gitomer, Aleszu Bajak, Matthew A. Baum, Katherine Ognyanova, Hong Qu, William R. Hobbs, Stefan McCabe, Jon Green
A 50-State COVID-19 Survey, 2020
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented disruption of everyday life in America that has been exacerbated by the infodemic of COVID-19 misinformation spread on social media. In this report, we examine the tweets of 1.6 million registered American voters to ask: who is sharing COVID-19 fake news and what are they sharing? We find that older people and Republicans are more likely to share URLs from fake news web domains. In addition, we show that the most shared fake news web domain is The Gateway Pundit, which received far more shares than even the second most popular fake news domain.