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Prevalence of Misinformation

Guess et al. (2018): approximately 27% of Americans had consumed at least one fake news article over the five weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Fourney et al. (2016): ca. 0.34% of Microsoft Explorer users (who agreed to anonymously share their internet usage) visited a fake news domain in a day. Grinberg et al. (2019): on twitter, ca. 5% of political content originates from fake news sources in 2016. Guess et al. (2018): 0.01 % of tweets contained fake news during the French presidential election in 2017.

Even thought these statistics have their limitations and are difficult to interpret, one can say that only a small amount of social media content is fake news and only a small amount of social media users is responsible for the huge dissemination of fake news.

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Updated 2021-08-07

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Psychology

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Empirical Science

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