After everything that’s happened since Russia used disinformation on social media to help Donald Trump in 2016, people are even more engaged with fake news on Facebook than they were back then. Actually, a lot more.
That’s the finding of a new study from the German Marshall Fund, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization that was founded in 1972 using a financial gift from Germany to the United States. The study reports that Facebook engagement with content from media outlets that repeatedly publish articles that are inaccurate or misleading has increased 242% since the third quarter of 2016. Such links have flourished on Facebook in this awful election-slash-pandemic year, rocketing up 177% in 2020 alone.
“A handful of sites masquerading as news outlets are spreading even more outright false and manipulative information than in the run-up to the 2016 election,” says GMF senior fellow and director Karen Kornbluh, who co-wrote the study. The GMF worked with the media literacy…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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