Older people and Republicans are most likely to share Covid-19 stories from fake news sites on Twitter

Since March, a group of scholars from Northeastern, Harvard, Rutgers, and Northwestern have been working to understand how social behaviors affect transmission of Covid-19. They’ve issued a series of reports over the months, and the most recent one is an analysis of nearly 30 million Covid-19-related tweets collected between January 1 and September 30, 2020, from over 500,000 registered U.S. voters.

The researchers found that a little over 1 percent of the URLs shared in the group of tweets linked to sites that “systematically” publish fake news.1 Sixty percent of the tweets linked to URLs from “known, reputable domains,” and 39.8% linked to “domains with unknown quality.”