A project called Comprova received nearly 50,000 visual misinformation sources from the 2018 Brazilian election from social media, while in comparison the study received 25,000 text-only misinformation sources.
Social media is easily manipulated by fake user accounts called bots. Each of these individual accounts can be programmed to support posts with certain keywords, post pre-scripted content, or comment on other posts that the bot's owner wants to make more prominent. There are tools to help check if an account is a bot. It is also suspicious if an account has mostly bot followers.
Falsehoods are 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.
