Grandma’s Retweets: How Suburban Seniors Spread Disinformation

In recent years, there have been concerns about social media and disinformation. The narrative has three dominant threads: (1) foreign troll farms pushing disinfo, (2) grifter influencers" pushing disinfo, and (3) the poor kids these days suckered in by disinformation.

A new study in Science suggests that instead of the kids or the trolls, perhaps we should be concerned about suburban moms. We discussed this on the most recent Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode, but let's look more closely at the details.

The authors of the report got access to data on over 600,000 registered voters on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter), looking at data shared during the 2020 election. They found a small number of supersharers" of false information, who were older suburban Republican women.

We found that supersharers were important members of the network, reaching a sizable 5.2% of registered voters on the platform. Supersharers had a significant overrepresentation of women, older adults, and registered Republicans. Supersharers' massive volume did not seem automated but was 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.

The researchers found that although the number of supersharers seemed low, they had a decent following. It's not surprising, as people are more likely to follow those who share useful" links (though, obviously it depends on what people consider useful").

... we found that supersharers had significantly higher network influence than both the panel and the SS-NF groups (P < 0.001). The median supersharer ranked in the 86th percentile in the panel in terms of network influence and measured 29% higher than the median SS-NF (supplementary materials, section S11). Next, we measured engagement with supersharers' content as the fraction of panelists who replied, retweeted, or quoted supersharers' tweets relative to their number of followers in the panel. More supersharers had people engaging with their content compared with the panel (P < 0.001), and more panelists engaged with supersharers' content compared with all groups

None of this is to say that there aren't Democrats who share fake news (there are) or men (obviously, there are) or young people (again, duh). But there appears to be a cluster of older Republican women who do so at a ridiculous pace. This chart below is fairly damning. Even as the panel had a higher Democratic component, Democrats were much more likely to share non-fake" news (SS-NF") as compared to fake news or, and much less likely to be supersharers."

The age distribution is also pretty notable as well:

Basically, the further you go down the spreading false info chart, the likely you are to be older.

This isn't wholly surprising. It's been said that the worst misinfo spreaders are boomers on social media who lack media literacy to understand that Turducken301384 isn't reliable source. But it's nice to see a study backing that up.

What will be more interesting is to see what happens over time. Will the issue of disinformation and misinformation diminish as younger, internet-savvy generations grow up, or will new issues arise?

My sense is that part of this is just the adjustment" period to a new communication medium. A decade and a half ago, Clay Shirky talked about the generational divide over new technologies, and how it took more or less a century of upheaval before people became comfortable with the printing press existing and able to produce things that (*gasp*) everyone might read.

It feels like we might be going through something similar with the internet. Though it's frustrating that the policy discussion is mostly dominated by some of that older generation who really, really, really wants to blame the tools and the young people, rather than maybe taking a harder look at themselves.