Survey spanning US, Spain, Germany, UK, Argentina and South Korea comes as tech giants try to clamp down on online falsehoods. Roughly one in three people across the United States, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Argentina and South Korea say they’ve seen false or misleading information on social media linked to the coronavirus, according to a new report.
The analysis, published Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, comes as Facebook and Google say they’ve pulled out all the stops to clamp down on how misinformation about COVID-19 is shared on their networks. Tech giants continue to face accusations that they’re not doing enough to remove online falsehoods and other digital content that may put people’s lives at risk.
These efforts to crack down have yet to eliminate all such material from social media, according to the Oxford University academics who polled more than 8,500 people, collectively, across the six countries during the final week of March and first days of April.
“The incentives that generate a lot of the misinformation are still there,” Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute and co-author of the study, told POLITICO. “Nothing will solve this problem on its own. It’s going to take greater collaboration.”
The highest levels of misinformation on social media were reported in Spain and Argentina where more than 40 percent of those polled in each country said they had seen some form of falsehood on the platforms, compared to just 28 percent of people in Germany.
In the U.K., that figure stood at 38 percent of those surveyed, while in the U.S., 33 percent said they had seen “a lot” or “a great deal” of false or misleading information on the digital platforms.
The U.S. also showed the greatest levels of polarization among those polled, with people favoring left-leaning political views showing a greater confidence in traditional media outlets and those with right-leaning political views believing the national government was a more credible source of news, according to the Reuters Institute report.
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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