Just 10 "superspreader" users on Twitter were responsible for more than a third of the misinformation posted over an eight-month period

[Austin]

Just 10 "superspreader" users on Twitter were responsible for more than a third of the misinformation posted over an eight-month period, according to a new report.

In total, 34 per cent of the "low credibility" content posted to the site between January and October of 2020 was created by the 10 users identified by researchers based in the US and UK.

This amounted to more than 815,000 tweets.

Researchers from Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media and the University of Exeter's Department of Computer Science analysed 2,397,388 tweets containing low credibility content, sent by 448,103 users.

More than 70 per cent of posts came from just 1,000 accounts.

So-called "superspreaders" were defined as accounts introducing "content originally published by low credibility or untrustworthy sources".

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-23/twitter-misinformation-x-report/103878248

 

[MrDawn]

Misinformation is pretty common on social media. It's why I refuse to have an account. So many people are parroting things that I'd rather not read about.

 

[NeoMetallix]

Still nothing compared to the misinformation spread by the US government.

 

[Austin]

Still nothing compared to the misinformation spread by the US government.

What do you mean?

 

[NeoMetallix]

What do you mean?

The US government reports cooked economic data to make it look like everything is good all the time and has been since I've been alive.

It's ironic that ABC is reporting on misinformation when they were huge spreaders of misinformation for the past several years and would be qualified as low credibility in my eyes.

Misinformation can be hard to spot sometimes but most of it can be proven false with research. Censorship always leads to more misinformation and just being wrong with malintent or innocently is no means to remove it.