WASHINGTON ��Voters in Michigan received nearly three times as many Twitter messages favoring Donald Trump in early November compared with posts supporting Hillary Clinton, a British research team found.
Among the politically related messages that included links to content from Nov. 1-11, nearly as many shared "junk news" such as propaganda and information from ideologically extreme political sources as did those carrying links to professionally gathered news stories, the study from Oxford University reported.
"The problem is that voters in a state like Michigan were learning about conspiracies more than fact," said professor Philip Howard of Oxford's Internet Institute, who led the research.
Trump's narrow victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by a combined margin of fewer than 78,000 votes, enabled him to win the presidency.
The Oxford researchers sought to take a snapshot of the potential impact of messages to voters as social media expand.
They released two analyses: one about the types of politically related social media in Michigan, which Trump won by about 10,700 votes, and a second examining the dimensions of fake news and other social media in Germany during its election.
In Michigan last fall, residents sent 138,686 politically related Twitter posts during the seven days leading to the Nov. 8 election and for three ensuing days, according to data collected by the researchers. Of those 78,662, or 56.7 percent, were pro-Trump and 28,074 were pro-Clinton, they said.
Of 24,291 Michigan Twitter posts that shared links to political information, 5,615 directed recipients to "junk news," such as propaganda and information from ideologically extreme or conspiratorial political sources, while 5,668 linked to professionally gathered news stories. A March 2016 survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that about 21 percent of Americans were using Twitter, including 36 percent for people ages 19 to 29.
"Electing a politician is one of the most important democratic exercises we've had," Howard said. "We've fought several world wars to protect that right. Voters these days are making decisions with very poor quality information about the problems that we all have to deal with."
Howard said the study tracked a couple of days after the election in an effort to gauge what normal Twitter activity would look like.
Howard said that a third of the so-called junk news shared on Twitter in Michigan during the 10-day study period came from five far-right news sites: Breitbart News, InfoWars, the Daily Caller, Liberty Alliance and Truthfeed.
The Oxford researchers cited "numerous examples of misinformation distributed online with the intention of misleading voters or simply earning a profit through scandalous headlines and evidence of manipulation of online public opinion."
The World Economic Forum, a nonprofit foundation that focuses on global issues, recently said that the growth of misinformation online was one of society's top 10 perils, they said.
