Latest reports from German Marshall Fund Digital, On Facebook, Misinformation Is More Popular Now Than in 2016. This is due to the more number of people using Facebook to share information during this pandemic.
Combating Misinformation is a big task for the social media Gaints like Facebook, twitter and what’s app. Even though they are finding broad number of ways to limit the spread of misinformation, but they are continuously failing to do that.About two thirds of those likes and comments were of articles published by 10 outlets, which the researchers categorized as “false content producers” or “manipulators.” Those news outlets included Palmer Report and The Federalist, according to the research.
Here is what the study finds
- During the coronavirus pandemic, interactions with articles from all news sites—including those that meet journalistic standards—increased dramatically. But interactions with articles from deceptive sites remained high in the third quarter of 2020, while interactions with legitimate journalistic outlets dropped closer to their pre-pandemic levels.
- Interactions with content from both deceptive site categories (Manipulators and False Content Producers) increased more slowly from the third quarter of 2016 until the fourth quarter of 2019 but the amount of interactions spiked by 177 percent during 2020.
- Since the third quarter of 2016, the growth of interactions with articles from both groups of deceptive sites was driven by a 293 percent increase in the Manipulators subgroup, from approximately 390 million to 1.52 billion in the third quarter of 2020.
- There were more interactions with content from Manipulators in the second quarter of 2020 than in all of 2017.
- Interactions with content from the False Content Producers has increased by 102 percent since the third quarter of 2016.
