'Fake news more popular than real news' on Facebook

Ground Report | New Delhi: Fake news more popular; A recent study concludes that fake news on Facebook was more popular than real news during the 2020 US election. According to the Washington Post, researchers at New York University and the University of Grenoble Alps in France found that from August 2020 to January 2021, articles that spread false information received six times as many likes and shares as accurate news and were discussed.

Fake news more popular

Dr. Rebecca Trumbull, head of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, told the Washington Post that the study "adds to the growing number of pieces of evidence that, despite various mitigation efforts, misinformation fees Easily available on the book and read.

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Facebook says the study does not show the full picture. A Facebook spokesperson told The Independent: "This report looks mostly at how people read the content of the pages, which represents a very small amount of all the content on Facebook."

He said: 'Engagement on Facebook should not be confused with how many people actually see it on Facebook. When you look at the most accessible content on Facebook, it's not exactly what this study suggests, such as our widely viewed content report and the Social Science One Condor dataset study.

Responding to this point on Twitter, Dr. Trumbull said that Facebook keeps secret "how many people actually see" data (called "impressions").

Facebook does not provide data on impressions

Like a broken record, Facebook responded that the study looks at engagement, not impressions. This gives researchers the opportunity to say once again that Facebook does not provide data on impressions.

The professor added on Twitter that it was time to shut down or ban Facebook so that it could make the data available for independent and external scrutiny.

This year, misinformation on social media has become a serious problem at a time when the United States is struggling to vaccinate all its citizens with the COVID-19 vaccine.

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Posts that promote false and conspiratorial views about coronavirus vaccine shots have become very popular on Facebook and may have helped prevent some people from getting vaccinated.

An analysis of Crowd Tangle's data in July found that nine of the top 15 performing Facebook posts about the vaccine made false or dangerous claims and were shared hundreds of thousands of times.

The same month, President Joe Biden's frustration with misinformation erupted when he said that social media companies were "killing people." (He later retracted his comment.)

The NYU-Alpes study found that right-wing publishers published more inaccurate information than left-wingers, but both right-wing and left-wing misinformation were well-known, and publishers on both sides refused to publish it.

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