Social Media Sway | Science News

Love Science? Welcome Home.

Support Amazing Science Journalism.

Create the New Science Generation.

﻿
Feature

Social Media Sway

Worries over political misinformation on Twitter attract scientists’ attention

By
11:01am, October 5, 2012

Four days before the 2010 special election in Massachusetts to fill the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy, an anonymous source delivered a blast of political spam. The smear campaign launched against Democratic candidate Martha  Coakley quickly infiltrated the rest of the election-related chatter on the social networking service Twitter. Detonating over just 138 minutes, the “Twitter bomb” and the rancorous claims it brought with it eventually reached tens of thousands of people.

This article is available only to subscribing members. Join the Society today or Log in.

Get Science News headlines by e-mail.

More from Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-media-sway
www.sciencenews.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-04
121572
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NGFN5TKDZ3ZO7IZLEEGKI7OWQSOHI67A
<urn:uuid:e9e01292-02c8-449a-830c-648151fb1210>
2017-01-19T11:51:00Z
23.13.152.123
sha1:UBJAUWOOQW5HBR27DPZ6W5HZWFDWBUWF
<urn:uuid:c86b879f-611c-4d8c-bf52-cce447bcc37f>
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-media-sway
response
<urn:uuid:d154aebe-acd4-4c86-809b-d33f7ff5cf34>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf