We’re VineSight, an AI startup that detects fake news on social networks. For over a year now, we have been analyzing the Twitter firehose, crawling the Internet’s social graph for content and connections in order to detect fake news mere moments after it’s released into the wild — regardless of whether it appears as raw text, images, memes, or video. Today, our automated technology finds fake news tweets within hours after they are posted.

This report details the most viral fake news attacks we have detected in the weeks leading up to and immediately following the Democratic Presidential debates.

Most fake news attacks start with a kernel of truth. Trolls and bots then change the story and mix in a dash of hate, outrage, and sometimes humor. Finally, they use automation to make the fake tweet go viral.

Every tweet in this report was identified by VineSight within 24 hours of its publishing, using our cutting edge AI technology and subsequently stored in our fake news database. In this report we only included tweets that passed a viral threshold of retweets and likes. Most of them have hundreds or thousands of retweets, allowing us to present a snapshot of the viral and influential fake news currently making its way through Twitter.

In this next section, we will break down the specific attacks that are being launched at the top Democratic presidential candidates. But before doing so, let’s first give you a sense of which top candidates were subjected to the most fake news in recent months. The graph below displays the percentage of fake news targeting each candidate out of the total fake news tweets detected by VineSight.