The human component in social media and fake news: the performance of UK opinion leaders on Twitter during the Brexit campaign

ABSTRACT Ever since David Cameron announced the UK’s EU referendum in February 2016, discussions about Fake News during the Brexit campaign have been thriving and sparking debates on the role of social media in the run-up to Brexit. So far, research on this topic has mainly focused on the automatic spread of false information, through bots, for example. Building on the assumption that political leaders accounted for Fake News as well, my analysis adds a human component: I screened more than 1400 tweets posted by David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage during the Brexit campaign. Using fact-checking platforms, I verified each leader’s top three arguments for Remain or Leave. As the results show, some political leaders turned out to be part of the Fake News epidemic surrounding Brexit: Johnson and Farage shared multiple arguments that were clearly misleading, while Corbyn and Cameron mostly stuck to the facts (although some of their points were speculative). Furthermore, my analysis provides insights into the prevalent arguments used by the respective leaders and their performance on Twitter in general.