The combination of political divisiveness and the COVID-19 pandemic led to fake news running rampant on social media in 2020. That's not really news; but you might be surprised at how fake news was shared. According to The German Marshall Fund of the United States, verified Twitter users shared a significant percentage of deceptive website news by the end of the year.
The GMF discovered that false content producers and manipulators received nearly one third (47 million) of the 155 million verified-account shares in Q4 2020. Overall, false-content-producer shares increased by over 160%, and manipulators increased by nearly 120%, while all US websites increased by a mere 14% in 2020. This has led false-content producers and manipulators to, respectively, triple and double their verified account shares since 2018.
At the top of the chart is the Gateway Pundit, which received more shares from verified Twitter users at the end of the year than The Washington Post.The Washington Post. Breitbart received an equal amount of interactions, and Fox News, Just the News, and the Epoch Times ranked higher than NBC News.
Facebook has also contributed to the spread of disinformation, with manipulators growing their interactions 165% over the last four years against just a 75% increase for all US-based sites. In total, deceptive websites received 6.4 billion interactions in 2020, twice the number seen four years ago. In the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, deceptive sites received 1.2 billion interactions, nearly a fourth of the total 5.1 billion interactions for US-based sites.
Many false-content producers and manipulators did see a drastic fall in interactions as a result of Facebook changing its algorithm. But RedStateObserver.com still managed to receive more interactions than the Wall Street JournalWall Street Journal in the fourth quarter of 2020. Newsmax also managed to beat out the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times in that same time period.
Given the results that were collected this past year, the GMF is comfortable confirming that the actions made by Facebook and Twitter to stop the spread of fake news proved to be effective. Hopefully, these platforms will continue their efforts to manage the content people publish and share. In the meantime, here are several tools to help identify what's real and what's fake news.