JUST A FEW FAKE AND CONSPIRACY OUTLETS DOMINATED DURING THE ELECTION-AND NEARLY ALL OF THEM CONTINUE TO DOMINATE TODAY These accounts continue to publish more than a million tweets in a typical day. Contrary to claims that fake news is a game of “whack-a-mole,” more than 80 percent of the disinformation accounts in our election maps are still active as this report goes to press. Yet disinformation continues to be a substantial problem postelection, with 4.0 million tweets linking to fake and conspiracy news publishers found in a 30-day period from mid-March to mid-April 2017. MUCH FAKE NEWS AND DISINFORMATION IS STILL BEING SPREAD ON TWITTERĬonsistent with other research, we find more than 6.6 million tweets linking to fake and conspiracy news publishers in the month before the 2016 election. Crucially, we study fake and conspiracy news both before and after the election, allowing us to measure how the fake news ecosystem has evolved since November 2016. Using tools and mapping methods from Graphika, a social media intelligence firm, we study more than 10 million tweets from 700,000 Twitter accounts that linked to more than 600 fake and conspiracy news outlets. One of the largest analyses to date on how fake news spread on Twitter both during and after the 2016 election campaign.
