What Is Reality? It's Harder and Harder to Tell Online
Fake news is nothing new; we’ve been dealing with careless gossip and malicious disinformation for ages. But social media has made it much, much easier to invent and spread fake news across the globe. And other tech tactics, including troll farms and deepfakes, are making it harder to tell what’s real and what’s false.
Chatbot company Tidio took a look at this situation recently: It surveyed nearly 500 Reddit users about how they identify and deal with fake news, and it dug into numerous studies and reports on fake news.
Some key takeaways from the exhaustive report: Social media is the number-one spreader of fake news, for a full 88% of us. The next largest source: online magazines and news portals, at 68%—maybe the word “news” should be in quotes. Real-life conversations follow, then TV, and last, newspapers (yay newspapers!).
How good are we at identifying fake news, though? Nealy 61% of social media users think they have a pretty good inner lie-detector. But of course, that’s self-reported; it may be harder than we think to flag disinformation. Facebook removed 6.5 billion fake accounts in 2021. Chances are one or two of them might have fooled even the most skeptical of us.
Another finding that not everyone may be aware of: The Russian government and so-called Russian web brigades account for a large amount of the disinformation floating around on social media platforms. Conspiracy theorists are also responsible for spreading fakes news—because supporting their world views is more important than telling the truth.
There’s lots of additional useful information in Tideo’s report. And please read PCMag’s tips on how to spot fake news online.
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