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.

摘要

自大卫·卡梅隆（David Cameron）于2016年2月宣布英国对欧盟进行公投以来，英国脱欧运动期间有关假新闻的讨论一直很活跃，并引发了关于社交媒体在英国脱欧前夕的作用的辩论。到目前为止，有关该主题的研究主要集中在通过机器人等自动传播虚假信息上。在假设政治领导人也是假新闻的前提下，我的分析增加了人为因素：我筛选了英国脱欧战役期间戴维·卡梅伦，杰里米·科宾，鲍里斯·约翰逊和奈杰尔·法拉奇发布的1400多条推文。使用事实检查平台，我验证了每个领导者保留或离开的前三个参数。结果表明，一些政治领袖被证明是围绕英国退欧的假新闻大流行的一部分：约翰逊和法拉格分享了明显有误导性的多个论点，而科宾和卡梅伦则大多坚持事实（尽管他们的某些观点只是推测） 。此外，我的分析提供了对各自领导人普遍使用的论点及其在Twitter上的总体表现的见解。