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...