Supersharers of fake news on Twitter

Governments may have the capacity to flood social media with fake news, but little is known about the use of flooding by ordinary voters. In this work, we identify 2107 registered US voters that account for 80% of the fake news shared on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election by an entire panel of 664,391 voters. We find that supersharers are important members of the network, reaching a sizable 5.2% of registered voters on the platform. Supersharers have a significant overrepresentation of women, older adults, and registered Republicans. Supersharers' massive volume does not seem automated but is 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., This dataset contains aggregated information necessary to replicate the results reported in our work on Supersharers of Fake News on Twitter while respecting and preserving the privacy expectations of individuals included in the analysis. No individual-level data is provided as part of this dataset. 
The data collection process that enabled the creation of this dataset leveraged a large-scale panel of registered U.S. voters matched to Twitter accounts. We examined the activity of 664,391 panel members who were active on Twitter during the months of the 2020 U.S. presidential election (August to November 2020, inclusive), and identified a subset of 2,107 supersharers, which are the most prolific sharers of fake news in the panel that together account for 80% of fake news content shared on the platform. We rely on a source-level definition of fake news, that uses the manually-labeled list of fake news sites by Grinberg et al. 2019 and an updated list based on NewsGuard ratings (commercial..., , # Supersharers of Fake News on Twitter

This repository contains data and code for replication of the results presented in the paper.

The folders are mostly organized by research questions as detailed below. Each folder contains the code and publicly available data necessary for the replication of results. Importantly, no individual-level data is provided as part of this repository. De-identified individual-level data can be attained for IRB-approved uses under the terms and conditions specified in the paper. Once access is granted, the restricted-access data is expected to be located under `./restricted_data`.

The folders in this repository are the following:

## Preprocessing

Code under the `preprocessing` folder contains the following:

1. source classifier - the code used to train a classifier based on NewsGuard domain flags to match the fake news labels source definition use in Grinberg et el. 2019 labels.
2. political classifier - the code used to identify political tweets, i...