Trump's party leaders share fake news: 1.7 million tweets containing false news

Members of the Republican Party of former US President Donald Trump share the fakest news. This has been revealed in research by the Graz University of Technology in Austria and the University of Bristol, UK. The number of links to suspicious websites in tweets shared by Republican Party leaders doubled in just 4 years. This number was 2.4% between 2016 and 2018, which increased to 5.5% between 2020 and 2022.
The amount of unreliable information shared by politicians on social media is increasing, says Dr. Jana Lasser, head of this joint research. It has increased rapidly during the last five years. Right-wing leaders of the countries involved in the research have shared more such links, but in the US, the tweets of the leaders of the Republican Party of former President Donald Trump have seen a huge boom.
For this research, about 34 lakh tweets made by leaders between 2016 and 2022 were analyzed. This included 1.7 million tweets from US parliamentarians, nearly one million tweets from British lawmakers and 7.5 lakh tweets from German lawmakers.
Professor Stephen Lewandowski, Chairperson of the Department of Psychology, University of Bristol, said leaders are part of the educated class. People take inspiration from them. In such a situation, rapidly posting false and unverified news by politicians is a matter of problem. It is therefore imperative to criticize the information shared by them and question the sources.
Republican members post almost nine times more links than Democratic members. Only 0.4% of Democrats' tweets are linked to less trusted sites. The chances of MPs sharing fake news in Europe are negligible.