It is estimated that 30% of Trump’s followers are fake.
In the USA, the victory of Donald Trump in 2017 was marked by a tragic episode of fake news spreading in an intent of taking his opponent down, opening his path to the White House.
With people being more and more connected through social media, creating and spreading fake news has become the easiest way of making a political campaign. But it is a crime.
The whole thing is based on the credibility of the person spreading the message, who can be anyone who has received it previously and who, without checking, sent it to more people. Sometimes this person will even reinforce the message with his own words, which will help increase the network power.
News influencing campaigns is not a new thing. Rede Globo, the greatest broadcast in Brazil in the 90’s, assumed to have manipulated information about candidates and created the biggest piece of fake news in the history of the country.
The danger becomes even greater when the spreading of these news is done by bots (fake accounts that are created to simulate human actions in standard way). According to the University of Oxford, more than half of the traffic online is done by means of robots. With a simple hashtag, for example, they turn any issue into a relevant matter, and this is then used as an important political tool.
It is estimated that 30% of Trump’s followers are robots. There are studies carried by FGV about controversial topics in Brazil that show that 13% of contrary news and 7% of the news in favor of a certain topic were automatically spread by bots, which influenced the public to have a negative opinion about the event.
In order to prove the practical effects of fake news, the Federal University of Paraíba, by means of its Laboratory of Digital Video Applications, carried an experiment about automatic spreading of fake news. This experiment was accompanied and published by Fantástico, a famous weekly television show in Brazil.
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