How much misinformation is on Facebook? Several studies have found that the amount of misinformation on Facebook is low or that the problem has declined over time.
This previous work, though, missed most of the story.
We are a communications researcher, a media and public affairs researcher and a founder of a digital intelligence company. We conducted a study that shows that other studies have overlooked massive amounts of misinformation. The biggest source of misinformation on Facebook is not links to fake-news sites but something more basic: images. And a large portion of posted pictures are misleading.
For instance, on the eve of the 2020 election, nearly one out of every four political image posts on Facebook contained misinformation. Widely shared falsehoods included QAnon conspiracy theories, misleading statements about the Black Lives Matter movement and unfounded claims about Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
Visual Misinformation by the Numbers
Our study is the first large-scale effort, on any social-media platform, to measure the prevalence of image-based misinformation about U.S. politics. Image posts are important to study, in part because they are the most common type of post on Facebook at roughly 40% of all posts.
Previous research suggests that images may be especially potent. Adding images to news stories can shift attitudes, and posts with images are more likely to be reshared. Images have also been a longtime component of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, like those of Russia’s Internet Research Agency.
We went big, collecting more than 13 million Facebook image posts from August 2020 through October 2020, from 25,000 pages and public groups. Audiences on Facebook are so concentrated that these pages and groups account for at least 94% of all engagement—likes, shares, reactions—for political-image posts. We used facial recognition to identify public figures, and we tracked reposted images. We then classified large, random draws of images in our sample, as well as the most frequently reposted images.
Overall, our findings are grim: 23% of image posts in our data contained misinformation. Consistent with previous work, we found that misinformation was unequally distributed along partisan lines. While only 5% of left-leaning posts
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