<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/06/03/grandmas-retweets-how-suburban-seniors-spread-disinformation/>
"In recent years, there have been concerns about social media and
disinformation. The narrative has three dominant threads: (1) foreign troll
farms pushing disinfo, (2) grifter “influencers” pushing disinfo, and (3) the
poor kids these days suckered in by disinformation.
A new study in
Science suggests that instead of the kids or the trolls,
perhaps we should be concerned about suburban moms. We discussed this on the
most recent
Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode, but let’s look more closely at the
details.
The authors of the report got access to data on over 600,000 registered voters
on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter), looking at data shared during the
2020 election. They found a small number of “supersharers” of false
information, who were older suburban Republican women.
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 researchers found that although the number of supersharers seemed low, they
had a decent following. It’s not surprising, as people are more likely to
follow those who share “useful” links (though, obviously it depends on what
people consider “useful”)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
