Fake-news ecosystem still thrives, two years after the 2016 election, new report says

(Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

Leading sources of phony news reports are still pumping massive amounts of misleading content onto the Internet despite nearly two years of promises by technology companies to address the problem, according to a report released Thursday morning.

With the congressional midterm elections just weeks away, the report prepared for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which supports research on journalism, the arts and other subjects, found that more than 80 percent of the Twitter accounts that it says frequently shared links to phony news reports during the 2016 election remain active. As a group, they publish more than a million tweets in a typical day.