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If you pay close attention, the news @DonaldJTrumpJr is eagerly sharing here is from Jan 3rd 2017, when @BarackObama was still president. Let's take a look at the circulation of anachronistic headlines on Twitter.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@DonaldJTrumpJr @BarackObama @ZellaQuixote To find examples of news articles that got widely recirculated long after they were current news, we searched for replies and quote tweets containing the text "this article is from" and filtered those replies based on the subsequent text (shown in red.)
@DonaldJTrumpJr @BarackObama @ZellaQuixote Next, we downloaded the tweets being replied to with "this article is from <X>" and restricted the results to tweets that received at least 1000 retweets and at least 10 replies questioning the age of the linked article.
@DonaldJTrumpJr @BarackObama @ZellaQuixote After eliminating a few false positives, we ended up with 19 news stories that were linked widely on twitter at least 60 days after they were news. In most cases, the belated spike(s) in activity were larger than the originals.
@DonaldJTrumpJr @BarackObama @ZellaQuixote Why is this happening? Bots don't seem to be the story here; 62 of a random sample of 2141 accounts (2.9%) linking anachronistic headlines appear to be automated based on 24/7 activity and/or use of automation tools/custom apps.
@DonaldJTrumpJr @BarackObama @ZellaQuixote Linking out-of-date news seems to be a primarily human practice, with major accounts who are either indifferent to or actively seeking to exploit confusion over the age of a headline as a major driver.
