Illustration: Bodara

of US voters who shared political news on X (formerly Twitter) during the 2020 presidential election campaign were responsible for 80 percent of the fake news that was disseminated at the time. This is the conclusion of a study published in Science in April 2024. What is surprising is that these so-called supersharers were not bots but mostly older people, with an average age of 58. What’s more, 60 percent of them were women. “They are literally sitting at their computer pressing retweet, says co-author Briony Swire-Thompson in Science. Now the big question is: ‘Why are they doing what they’re doing?’”

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