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The notice concluded:

>The PLOS ONE Editors retract this article [1] because, per our editorial assessment, it did not meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria (#3, 4) [2]. We regret that the issues with the article were not identified and addressed prior to its publication.

Both authors did not agree with the retraction and stand by the article’s findings.
Germani told us he thought the journal’s initial request for a revision to the paper “would have been a reasonable approach.”

He and his co-author, Biller-Andorno, disagreed with the editorial team and subject expert’s assessment of the methodological concerns, he said, but were “happy to have the opportunity to make corrections to the paper,” and the back-and-forth of corrections, or a response article and reply, “is just how science should work.”

The findings about Trump’s role in the anti-vaccine Twitter community were a surprise to him, he said, and he expressed concern that political considerations could have influenced the retraction decision:

>It’s not clear to us why this paper had to be retracted at all costs and with little communication from the journal.
Germani and Biller-Andorno have posted a revised version of the paper as a preprint, with a disclaimer detailing the history with PLOS ONE and a supplementary PDF responding to the issues listed in the retraction notice.

We reached out to PLOS for comment on Germani’s concern that PLOS’s editors may have felt political pressure to retract the article. Renee Hoch, managing editor for publication ethics, responded:

>The claim is untrue. The retraction decision reflects PLOS’ assessment of how the unresolved issues identified in our post-publication editorial assessment aligned with the PLOS Retraction Policy and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Retraction Guidelines. External parties do not contribute to or influence our editorial decisions.