Social media acts as a conduit for fake news websites, where we define fake news as information that mirrors legitimate news in form, but “lacks the news media’s editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information.”4 During the 2016 election, for example, many researchers and journalists alike failed to track the weaponization of misinformation on social media, leaving them to retroactively discover which demographics had been most active in sharing fake news after the election had taken place. It is important to understand in real time which parts of the population are sharing fake news on Twitter.The COVID-19 pandemic has been a once-in-a-generation disruption for Americans. According to the CDC, by October 2020, there were over 8 million cases of COVID-19 and over 200,000 deaths.5 The consequences for Americans have been wide-ranging, from coping with staggering numbers of illnesses and deaths, to restrictions on freedom of movement, to mass unemployment and economic crisis. There has been a great deal of confusion and misinformation surrounding COVID-19 − a so-called Infodemic6 − with much of it occurring online. The BBC documented the direct costs of COVID-19 misinformation, which include alcohol and cleaning product poisonings, assault, property damage and heightened racism.7In our panel, between January 1st and September 30th, 2020, the vast majority of shared URLs from COVID-19 tweets are either from known, reputable domains (60%), or domains with unknown quality (38.9%). URLs from domains that publish fake news only comprise 1.1% of the URLs from COVID-19 tweets. However, this is likely an underestimate because if we include web domains rated as “orange” in our fake news classification system, the percentage of shared fake news URLs increases to 1.8%.
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