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How much misinformation is there on Facebook? Several studies have found that the amount of misinformation on such a network is low or that the problem has decreased over time. However, in such cases an important part of the story has been lost.
We conducted a study that shows what other studies have missed: Massive amounts of misinformation. And it is that the biggest source of misinformation on Facebook is not the links to fake news sites, but something more basic: the images. And a large part of the published images are misleading.
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For example, on the eve of the 2020 US election, nearly one in four posts of political images on Facebook contained misinformation. Widely shared falsehoods included QAnon conspiracy theories, misleading statements about the Black Lives Matter movement, and unsubstantiated claims about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Our study is the first large-scale effort, on any social media platform, to measure the prevalence of image-based misinformation about American politics. Posts with images are important to study, in part because they are the most common post type on Facebook with approximately 40 percent of all posts.
Previous research suggests that images can be especially powerful. Adding images to feeds can change attitudes and posts with images are more likely to get shared. The images have also long been a component of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, such as those by Russia’s Internet Research Agency.
We are dedicated to collecting more than 13 million Facebook image posts, from August to October 2020, from 25 thousand public pages and groups. Audiences on Facebook are so concentrated that these pages and groups account for at least 94 percent of all interactions (likes, shares, reactions) for political image posts.
We use facial recognition to identify public figures and track republished images. We then rank large random giveaways of images in our sample, as well as the most frequently republished images.
Overall, our findings are grim: 23 percent of the image posts in our data contained misinformation. Consistent with previous work, we found that misinformation was distributed unevenly across party lines. While only 5 percent of left-wing posts contained misinformation, 39 percent of right-wing posts did.
The misinformation we found on Facebook was very repetitive and often simple. While there were many misleadingly manipulated images, these were outnumbered by memes with misleading text, screenshots of fake posts from other platforms, or posts that took unaltered images and misrepresented them.
For example, an image was repeatedly posted as “proof” that now-former Fox News host Chris Wallace was a close associate of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Actually, the gray-haired man in the image is not Epstein, but actor George Clooney.
Image posts on Facebook were toxic in ways that went beyond simple misinformation. We found countless images that were abusive, misogynistic, or just plain racist. Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, and Michelle Obama were the most frequent targets of abuse.
Huge gap in knowledge
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Much more work remains to be done to understand the role that visual disinformation plays in the digital political landscape. While Facebook remains the most widely used social media platform, more than a billion images a day are posted on Facebook’s sister platform Instagram, and billions more on rival Snapchat. Videos posted to YouTube, or more recently arriving TikTok, can also be a major vector of political misinformation about which researchers still know very little.
Perhaps the most disturbing finding of our study, then, is that it highlights the breadth of collective ignorance about misinformation on social media. Hundreds of studies have been published on the subject, but until now researchers haven’t understood the biggest source of misinformation on the biggest social media platform. What else are we missing?
* Scholars from Texas A&M University, George Washington University, and Columbia University.
2023-07-04 08:00:00
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