A survey conducted in December 2020 assessing if news consumers in the United States had ever unknowingly shared fake news or information on social media found that 38.2 percent had done so. A similar share had not, whereas seven percent were unsure if they had accidentally disseminated misinformation on social networks.

Fake news in the U.S.

Fake news, or news that contains misinformation, has become a prevalent issue within the American media landscape. Fake news can be circulated online as news stories with deliberately misleading headings, or clickbait, but the rise of misinformation cannot be solely accredited to online social media. Forms of fake news are also found in print media, with 47 percent of Americans witnessing fake news in newspapers and magazines as of January 2019.

News consumers in the United States are aware of the spread of misinformation, with many Americans believing online news websites regularly report fake news stories. With such a high volume of online news websites publishing false information, it can be difficult to assess the credibility of a story. This can have damaging effects on society in that the public struggled to keep informed, creating a great deal of confusion about even basic facts and contributing to incivility.

The term ‘fake news’ is used in multiple different contexts, but officially refers simply to false information presented as legitimate news. Adults in the United States believe social media platforms and online news sites to be the most likely sources of fake news – 58 percent of respondents to a survey believed that Facebook was the most likely place in which they would encounter false news stories, and 49 percent said the same about Twitter.

A separate study revealed that 66 percent of U.S. adults believed that 76 percent or more of the news they saw on social media was biased. Social networks are generally not seen as credible or trustworthy news platforms – on a global level, social media was the least trusted source of general news and information.

Why does social media fuel or help to spread fake news?

Sadly, the main way in which fake news can be so quickly disseminated throughout not only one, but multiple social media platforms, is by users sharing such news with others (either knowingly or unknowingly). The ability to share content with friends and family is one of the key appeals of social networks, but the ease of doing so becomes somewhat sinister when it comes to the spread of false information.

Ten percent of U.S. adults admitted to knowingly sharing fake news or information online, 49 percent said that they shared such content and later found out it was inaccurate or made up, and 52 percent admitted to having done either of these things. This is a serious cause for concern. Sharing news in good faith and later discovering it was fake is one thing, but deliberately and knowingly passing such content on to others is another. Many social media users blame the networks themselves for the spread of fake news. Whilst social platforms do make attempts to regulate the content shared on their sites, the more users who actively take responsibility for the content they choose to share and hold themselves accountable, the greater the overall impact.

Between 2011 and 2022, a total of 105 misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information (MDM) laws were passed in 78 countries worldwide. Looking at types of legal provisions, 64 countries passed laws that involved fines or imprisonment, and the source noticed that fines were the most commonly imposed penalty for those who appeared to create or share misinformation.

The Disinformation Detection Tools market is rapidly evolving, driven by the increasing prevalence of misinformation across various platforms. As organizations, governments, and individuals grapple with the challenges posed by fake news, deepfakes, and other forms of deceptive content, the demand for effective disin

According to a global study conducted in 2019, ** percent of respondents felt that there was a fair extent or great deal of fake news on online websites and platforms. By comparison, ** percent less said the same about TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Traditional media in general is still considered more trustworthy than online formats, despite social networks being the preferred choice for many.

Meanwhile, as some consumers around the world now turn to influencers for news instead of journalists, the risk of them being exposed to inaccurate, incorrect, or deliberately false information continues to grow, and journalists face pressure to battle fake content whilst finding new ways to keep audiences engaged.

Fake news and journalism

More than ** percent of journalists responding to a global survey believed that the public had lost trust in the media over the past year. Whilst the reasons for this are many, the role of fake news cannot be undermined, particularly given the speed with which false content can spread and reach vulnerable or misinformed audiences. Either unintentionally or deliberately, fake news is often shared by those who encounter it, which only serves to worsen the problem. Indeed, journalists consider regular citizens to be the main source of disinformation, followed by political leaders and internet trolls.

Despite the threats fake news poses, journalists themselves feel that concerns about disinformation could positively impact the quality of journalism. There are also growing expectations from the public and journalists alike for governments and companies to do more to help boost quality journalism and curb the dissemination and influence of fake news. News industry leaders rated Google as being the best platform for supporting journalism, but the likes of Amazon and Snapchat have a long way to go before organizations consider them reliable in this respect.

Social media platforms have been found to be the primary gateway through which individuals are exposed to fake news. The algorithmic filter bubbles and echo chambers that have popularized these platforms may also increase exposure to fake news. Because of this, scholars have suggested disrupting the stream of congruent information that filter bubbles and echo chambers produce, as this may reduce the impact and circulation of misinformation. To test this, a survey experiment was conducted via Amazon MTurk. Participants read ten short stories that were either all fake or half real and half fake. These treatment conditions were made up of stories agreeable to the perspective of Democrats, Republicans, or a mix of both. The results show that participants assigned to conditions that were agreeable to their political world view found fake stories more believable compared to participants who received a heterogeneous mix of news stories complementary to both world views. However, this "break up" effect appears confined to Democratic participants; findings indicate that Republicans assigned to filter bubble treatment conditions believed fake news stories at approximately the same rate as their fellow partisans receiving a heterogeneous mix of news items. This suggests that a potential "break up" may only influence more progressive users.Data included in this deposit:The Stata .dta fileThe Stata .do file used to generate tables and figures featured in the paperA .pdf file containing the text of the fake and real news items used in the paperA .pdf file containing the complete survey text

Abstract: This article seeks to quantify the extent to which Americans hold beliefs that are consistent with interpreting satiric news literally, and to assess whether factors known to promote misperceptions work differently depending on whether the source of the misperception is satire. We also test the robustness of those factors across a diverse set of real-world falsehoods. The study uses secondary data analysis, relying on data drawn from a 12-wave six-month panel conducted in 2019. Analyses focus on participants’ beliefs about 120 falsehoods derived from high-profile political content in circulation before each survey wave, including 48 based on satiric news. A non-trivial number of participants believed claims originating in satire, but it is less than the proportion who believed falsehoods derived from other misleading content. Results also confirm the robustness of established predictors of misperceptions while demonstrating that the associations differ in magnitude between satiric and non-satiric news.

During a 2025 survey, ** percent of respondents from Nigeria stated that they used social media as a source of news. In comparison, just ** percent of Japanese respondents said the same. Large portions of social media users around the world admit that they do not trust social platforms either as media sources or as a way to get news, and yet they continue to access such networks on a daily basis. Social media: trust and consumption Despite the majority of adults surveyed in each country reporting that they used social networks to keep up to date with news and current affairs, a 2018 study showed that social media is the least trusted news source in the world. Less than ** percent of adults in Europe considered social networks to be trustworthy in this respect, yet more than ** percent of adults in Portugal, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia said that they got their news on social media. What is clear is that we live in an era where social media is such an enormous part of daily life that consumers will still use it in spite of their doubts or reservations. Concerns about fake news and propaganda on social media have not stopped billions of users accessing their favorite networks on a daily basis. Most Millennials in the United States use social media for news every day, and younger consumers in European countries are much more likely to use social networks for national political news than their older peers. Like it or not, reading news on social is fast becoming the norm for younger generations, and this form of news consumption will likely increase further regardless of whether consumers fully trust their chosen network or not.

This data is from a survey of experts of misinformation -- researchers, practitioners, and policymakers -- who study or work on the problem in either the Global North or Global South. In March - April 2023, we asked them questions about their priors with respect to the effectiveness of a set of 12 interventions to combat misinformation.

A study held in early 2023 found that Indonesian adults were the most concerned about the spread of false information on social media, with over 80 percent saying that they were very or somewhat worried about the matter. Whilst Swedish and Danish respondents were less concerned about misinformation on social media, the global average among all countries was 68 percent, highlighting the growing awareness and worry about false information worldwide.

Many people consume news on social media, yet the production of news items online has come under crossfire due to the common spreading of misinformation. Social media platforms police their content in various ways. Primarily they rely on crowdsourced “flags”: users signal to the platform that a specific news item might be misleading and, if they raise enough of them, the item will be fact-checked. However, real-world data show that the most flagged news sources are also the most popular and – supposedly – reliable ones. In this paper, we show this phenomenon can be explained by the unreasonable assumptions current content policing strategies make about how the online social media environment is shaped. The most realistic assumption is that confirmation bias will prevent a user from flagging a news item if they share the same political bias as the news source producing it. We show, via agent-based simulations, that a model reproducing our current understanding of the social media environment will necessarily result in the most neutral and accurate sources receiving most flags.

Biological invasions are a major human induced global change that is threatening global biodiversity by homogenizing the world's fauna and flora. Species spread because humans have moved species across geographic boundaries and have changed ecological factors that structure ecosystems, such as nitrogen deposition, disturbance, etc. Many biological invasions are caused accidentally, as a byproduct of human travel and commerce driven product shipping. However, humans also have spread many species intentionally because of perceived benefits. Of interest is the role of the recent exponential growth in information exchange via internet social media in driving biological invasions. To date, this has not been examined. Here we show that for one such invasive species, goldenrod, social networks spread misleading and incomplete information that is enhancing the spread of goldenrod invasions into new environments. We show that the notion of goldenrod honey as a "superfood" with unsupported healing properties is driving a demand that leads beekeepers to produce goldenrod honey. Social networks provide a forum for such information exchange and this is leading to further spread of goldenrod in many countries where goldenrod is not native, such as Poland. However, this informal social information exchange ignores laws that focus on preventing the further spread of invasive species and the strong negative effects that goldenrod has on native ecosystems, including floral resources that negatively impact honeybee performance. Thus, scientifically unsupported information on "superfoods" such as goldenrod honey that is disseminated through social internet networks has real world consequences such as increased goldenrod invasions into novel geographical regions which decreases native biodiversity.

The dataset contains two types of articles fake and real News. This dataset was collected from realworld
sources; the truthful articles were obtained by crawling articles from Reuters.com (News
website). As for the fake news articles, they were collected from different sources. The fake news
articles were collected from unreliable websites that were flagged by Politifact (a fact-checking
organization in the USA) and Wikipedia. The dataset contains different types of articles on different
topics, however, the majority of articles focus on political and World news topics. ; itraore at ece.uvic.ca

List of excluded studies

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main traffic source for false information online is social media, which generates 42 percent of fake news traffic. The nature of social networks, most notably the ease of sharing content, allows fake news to spread at a rapid rate – an issue further exacerbated by the fact that many U.S. adults sometimes believe fake news to be real.

Fake news: an ongoing problem

The presence of fake news would be less of an issue if users were more aware of how to identify it and were aware of the risks of sharing such content. Many U.S. news consumers have shared fake news online, and worryingly, ten percent did so deliberately. Adults who are part of that ten percent are just a small portion of people in the United States, and elsewhere in the world, who are responsible for spreading false information. More than 30 percent of U.S. children and teenagers have shared a fake news story online, and over 50 percent of adults in selected countries worldwide have wrongly believed a fake news story.

The result of adults and young consumers alike not only believing fake news, but actively sharing it, is that small, illegitimate websites producing such content are able to grow more successful. Such websites have the potential to tarnish or seriously damage the reputation of any persons mentioned within a fake news article, promote events or policies which do not exist, and mislead readers about important topics they are trying to keep up with. A 2019 survey revealed that most adults believe that fake news and misinformation will get worse in the next five years, and the sad truth is that this will likely be the case unless news consumers grow more discerning about what they post and share online.

This contains original data (formatted for Stata) from the survey experiment in the paper, commands for data cleaning and replication, and all survey questions and treatment wording.

Fake news as one of a normal phenomenon all over the world, it exertsa great impact on both individuals and our society. With the popularity of social media, fake news increasingly invades our lives, even brings disadvantages to institutions or countries. According to the analysis of several examples, the study aims to improve the phenomenon of fake news in social media so as to promise the authenticity of news in the field of media and communication. Even though it is difficult to achieve nowadays, especially in the current information era, in fact, it calls for the collective effort by the government, information producers and social media platform, as well as audiences. In addition, this study also expects to offer a reference to future journalism practitioners and related academic researchers.

Almost a ***** of respondents to a 2022 survey held across the ** EU member states reported that they came across news which misrepresented reality or was false often or very often, with ** percent saying that this was the case. Just ***** percent disagreed entirely that they regularly saw fake and suspicious content, highlighting the growing problem of misinformation and the dissemination of made-up, manipulated, and doctored news content. False news sources worldwide A global study conducted in 2019 revealed that half of the respondents witnessed false news in newspapers and magazines. That year, the results showed that Turkey was the country with the most false news in its print media, with nearly ***** quarters of respondents encountering fake news in printed publications. In contrast, less than *** ***** of the respondents in Japan came across false information in newspapers and magazines. Media trustworthiness worldwide The findings to a global survey held between late 2018 and early 2019 showed that the majority of millennials admitted that they trusted the media to some extent to provide reliable and accurate information, while over a ******* said that they had no trust in the media at all for such purpose. As of 2020, traditional media and search engines were the two most trusted sources of news and information in the world. On the other hand, the level of trust in social media decreased between 2012 and 2020, making it the least trusted source of information in the latter year.  

Dataset including information from 3,864 academic articles published in high-impact indexed journals from 2000 to 2020 that includes the words "disinformation", "misinformation" and/or "fake news". Information was retrieved from JSTOR and EbscoHost databases, as well as scraped from the websites of Taylor and Francis and SAGE. This collection also includes the R language script using to analyse the data, included in the chapter "Research Methods in Comparative Disinformation Studies. The data (in a csv format) includes the following fields: Journal Title (journal_title) Article Title (article_title) Publication Year (article_year) Article Abstract (article_abstract) Article URL (article_url) Article DOI (article_doi) Source Database (source_db)

Abstract: In March 2020, shortly after the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, Facebook (the company is now rebranded as Meta) announced steps to stop the spread of COVID-19 and vaccine-related misinformation. This entailed identifying and removing false and misleading content that could contribute to “imminent physical harm”. For other types of misinformation the company’s fact-checking network was mobilised and automated moderation systems ramped up to “reduce its distribution”. In this paper we ask how effective this approach has been in stopping the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation in the Australian social media landscape? To address this question we analyse the performance of 18 Australian right-wing and anti-vaccination Facebook pages, posts and commenting sections collected over 2 years until July 2021. We use CrowdTangle’s engagement metrics and time series analysis to map key policy announcements (between Jan 2020 and July 2021) against page performance. This is combined with content analysis of comments parsed from 2 pages, and a selection of posts that continued to overperform during this timeframe. The results showed that the suppression strategy was partially effective, in that the performance of many previously high performing pages showed steady decline between 2019 and 2021. Nonetheless, some pages not only slipped through the net but overperformed, proving this strategy to be light-touch, selective and inconsistent. The content analysis shows that labelling and fact-checking of content and shadowbanning responses were resisted by the user community who employed a range of avoidance tactics to stay engaged on the platform, while also migrating some conversations to less moderated platforms.