Junk News and Bots during the U.S. Election: What Were Michigan Voters Sharing Over Twitter?

Computational propaganda distributes large amounts of misinformation about politics and public policy over
social media platforms. The combination of automation and propaganda can significantly impact public opinion
during important policy debates, elections, and political crises. We collected data on automation and junk news
using major hashtags related to politics in the state of Michigan in the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential
Election. In Michigan, conversation about politics over Twitter mirrored the national trends in that Trumprelated
hashtags were used more than twice as often as Clinton-related hashtags. Social media users in
Michigan shared a lot of political content, but the amount of professionally researched political news and
information was consistently smaller than the amount of extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked
commentary, fake news and other forms of junk news. Not only did such junk news “outperform” real news,
but the proportion of professional news content being shared hit its lowest point the day before the election.