Published in Science Magazine

AUTHORS
Sahar Baribi-Bartov, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Briony Swire-Thompson, Northeastern University, Boston
Nir Grinberg, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

ABSTRACT
Governments may have the capacity to flood social media with fake news, but little is known about the use of flooding by ordinary voters. In this work, we identify 2107 registered US voters who account for 80% of the fake news shared on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election by an entire panel of 664,391 voters. We found that supersharers were important members of the network, reaching a sizable 5.2% of registered voters on the platform. Supersharers had a significant overrepresentation of women, older adults, and registered Republicans. Supersharers’ massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting. These findings highlight a vulnerability of social media for democracy, where a small group of people distort the political reality for many.

The pathways to news have substantially changed in the past two decades. The rise of social media as a vector for news created new challenges for democracies because large segments of society can be rapidly exposed to misinformation while others are unaware of this exposure taking place. Although prior work has examined the role of foreign influence campaigns and automated accounts (bots) in spreading misinformation on social media, relatively little work has focused on the role of ordinary citizens in propagating misinformation online. Recent work has consistently found that a small fraction of people—referred to as supersharers—account for the majority (80%) of fake news shared by registered voters on social media. Because of the rarity of supersharers, it is extremely difficult to study a meaningfully sized sample of supersharers using traditional research methods (e.g., surveys or experiments). Apart from supersharers’ existence, we know little about the scale and scope of supersharers’ influence online, the distinctive characteristics of supersharers, or the technical affordances that give rise to their online dominance.

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