In April this year a special collection examining social media and politics was published in SAGE Open. Guest edited by Joshua A. Tucker and Pablo Barberá, the articles grew out of a series of conferences held by NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation lab (SMaPP) and the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study (GIAS) known as SMaPP-Global. Upon publication Joshua Tucker said ‘the collection of articles also shows the value of exposing researchers from a variety of disciplines with similar substantive interests to each other's work at regular intervals’. Interdisciplinary collaborative research projects are a cornerstone of what makes computational social science such an interesting field. We were intrigued to know more so caught up with Josh and Pablo to hear more.

These two studies examined fake news on separate social media platforms; Facebook and Twitter, with both concluding that sharing this content was a rare occurrence but when users did share fake news articles they tended to be older Americans over 65.