Paper Info
Title
What happened? The Spread of Fake News Publisher Content During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Abstract
The spread of content produced by fake news publishers was one of the most discussed characteristics of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Yet, little is known about the prevalence and focus of such content, how its prevalence changed over time, and how this prevalence related to important election dynamics. In this paper, we address these questions using tweets that mention the two presidential candidates sampled at the daily level, the news content mentioned in such tweets, and open-ended responses from nationally representative telephone interviews. The results of our analysis highlight various important lessons for news consumers and journalists. We find that (i.) traditional news producers outperformed fake news producers in aggregate, (ii.) the prevalence of content produced by fake news publishers increased over the course of the campaign-particularly among tweets that mentioned Clinton, and (iii.) changes in such prevalence were closely following changes in net Clinton favorability. Turning to content, we (iv.) identify similarities and differences in agenda setting by fake and traditional news media and show that (v.) information individuals most commonly reported to having read, seen or heard about the candidates was more closely aligned with content produced by fake news outlets than traditional news outlets, in particular for information Republican voters retained about Clinton. We also model fake-ness of retained information as a function of demographics characteristics. Implications for platform owners, news consumers, and journalists are discussed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3308558.3313721
WWW '19: The Web Conference on The World Wide Web Conference WWW 2019
Keywords
Field
DocType
fake news, multi-level regression, news media, topic modeling
Presidential system,World Wide Web,Advertising,Computer science,Presidential election,News media,Demographics,Fake news,Topic model
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6674-8
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ceren Budak11096.60