News Item

Social Media Engagement with Deceptive Sites Reached Record Highs in 2020 | The German Marshall Fund

On January 6, a mob stormed the Capitol over false claims of voter fraud. Those false claims spread widely on social media: Facebook and Twitter have been inundated with such claims since the election. The level of engagement with deceptive content on Twitter and Facebook hit record highs in 2020 and remained high in the fourth quarter of the year, as false and manipulative content about the election and the coronavirus spread widely.

In October, GMF’s Digital New Deal project launched an ongoing project that monitors engagement on social media with deceptive sites that masquerade as journalism. The Digital New Deal project partnered with NewsGuard, a nonpartisan service that rates news and information websites for their reliability, to monitor two kinds of deceptive sites:

[…]

Source: Social Media Engagement with Deceptive Sites Reached Record Highs in 2020 | The German Marshall Fund of the United States