Twitter users spreading fake news targeted swing states in the run-up to Election Day

The project’s research on how polarizing information was distributed across Twitter in the lead up to the 2016 US election was covered in Business Insider.

A new study conducted by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project found that “low quality political information” and “ideologically extreme” junk news flooded 12 battleground states in the run-up to US Election Day, strategically targeting pivotal voters before and after November 8.

The study is the first to document on a large scale how propaganda and conspiratorial information was “strategically disseminated” throughout the country before the election. The researchers said they based their analysis on a dataset of 22,117,221 tweets collected November 1-11 that contained hashtags related to politics and came from users with traceable locations.

Read the full article here.