Surges of Political “Fake News”: A case study on Twitter.

Abstract In this paper we propose an analysis of the so-called political “fake news” on Twitter, based on a case study. We examined fake news that circulated during the trial and imprisonment of the Brazilian ex-president Lula da Silva. Through social network and qualitative analyses, we found that this fake news circulated mostly among highly partisan clusters and that their spread is influenced by a certain type of user.