A new study has shown that the sharing of fake news has dropped significantly on social media in recent months.

Posted on 06-09-2021 by Esther Buitekant

The efforts paid off

The ‘fakes news’, false information in French, are the terror of social networks. The biggest platforms have invested significant resources to overcome it, and it seems that it is starting to bear fruit. The German Marshall Fund launched the Digital New Deal at the start of the year, the initial findings of which were published in a study published at the end of May. It reveals a notable drop in the sharing of false information in the first quarter of 2021. Both on Twitter, in the order of 60%, and on Facebook where the decrease in Internet user interactions with these publications is 15%. To come to that conclusion, the researchers studied figures from the social media analytics company NewsWhip. ‘This encouraging decline shows that they (the platforms, note) in fact have effective tools to attack the source of information. We encourage platforms to continue to take proactive measures instead of resorting to ineffective efforts against content that has already gone viral, ‘observed Karen Kornbluh, Director of the Digital New Deal initiative.

Donald Trump, le grand absent

If the efforts made by Twitter and Facebook are obviously taken into account, there is another important element to have weighed in the balance: the absence of Donald Trump. Compulsive user of social networks, the former US president regularly shared false information on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. In the week following its viction following the assault on the Capitol on January 6, Zignal Labs notably observed a 73% drop in fake news posts on major platforms.

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