After receiving criticism for years that it doesn’t do enough to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform, Facebook enacted a series of reforms that were meant to make it so that the platform could potentially end up stopping misinformation from spreading in the first place. The Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2016 showed that Facebook was not to be trusted, and people were hoping that by the time the next election came around Facebook will have cleaned up its act but the truth of the situation is that this is not the case at all.
A study recently conducted by the German Marshall Fund has shown that media outlets that publish fake news or misinformation for malicious purposes have actually become more widespread, with this content increasing by a massive 242% over the past 4 years. 2020 in particular has been a bad year in this regard, with the true increase taking place over the last eight months and adding up to about 177% more than what people had been seeing just a few years before, something that would lead a lot of commentators to worry about how Facebook might be negatively impacting people and potentially leading the upcoming US election to be less legitimate than it could have otherwise been.
The news outlets that are publishing this kind of information might seem legitimate at first. Sites like Fox News and the Daily Wire are not names that you would usually associated with fake news and misinformation, but the fact of the matter is that they have both seen the biggest increase in misinformation related content. Platforms like Breitbart and the Western Journal, both of which are known for spreading fake news in spite of the fact that their followers don’t seem to mind, have not seen increases that are nearly as significant as those of the more well known platforms that we have discussed here.
This shows that mainstream media outlets are actively taking part in trying to trick people, and Facebook is their platform of choice probably because of the fact that the tech company does not care much about the kind of content that is being shared. Facebook urgently needs to address this matter otherwise people will stop trusting it, or worse people would simply begin to accept the fake news they are seeing at face value.
Read next: Apple is ranked as the most intimate brand during pandemic in MBLM's Brand Intimacy Study
A study recently conducted by the German Marshall Fund has shown that media outlets that publish fake news or misinformation for malicious purposes have actually become more widespread, with this content increasing by a massive 242% over the past 4 years. 2020 in particular has been a bad year in this regard, with the true increase taking place over the last eight months and adding up to about 177% more than what people had been seeing just a few years before, something that would lead a lot of commentators to worry about how Facebook might be negatively impacting people and potentially leading the upcoming US election to be less legitimate than it could have otherwise been.
The news outlets that are publishing this kind of information might seem legitimate at first. Sites like Fox News and the Daily Wire are not names that you would usually associated with fake news and misinformation, but the fact of the matter is that they have both seen the biggest increase in misinformation related content. Platforms like Breitbart and the Western Journal, both of which are known for spreading fake news in spite of the fact that their followers don’t seem to mind, have not seen increases that are nearly as significant as those of the more well known platforms that we have discussed here.
This shows that mainstream media outlets are actively taking part in trying to trick people, and Facebook is their platform of choice probably because of the fact that the tech company does not care much about the kind of content that is being shared. Facebook urgently needs to address this matter otherwise people will stop trusting it, or worse people would simply begin to accept the fake news they are seeing at face value.
Read next: Apple is ranked as the most intimate brand during pandemic in MBLM's Brand Intimacy Study
