A new report out Thursday says Twitter users in battleground states saw more propaganda and fake news in the days immediately before and after the 2016 election than did the rest of the country.
Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project found unknown political actors used bots and trolls to make sure people across the United States saw just as much junk and disinformation on Twitter as stories from professional news outlets during the presidential campaign. But in 12 battleground states, including Florida, New Hampshire, and Virginia, users actually encountered more fake information than legitimate news, leading researchers to conclude the push was an intentional effort to influence voters in targeted geographic areas.
Twitter criticized the report as "inaccurate and methodologically flawed" because "the study drew on a sample of tweets issued between Nov. 1 and Nov. 11 using the Twitter API, which contains up to 1 percent of all tweets." But Oxford professor and report co-author Philip N. Howard defends the work:
"I admit they have better data that they don’t share through their API, and would welcome the chance to get better resolution on all this. It’s unlikely that the punchline would change.”
Propaganda flowed heavily into battleground states around election, study says (WaPo)
Social Media, News and Political Information during the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States? (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)