Rampant online misinformation looms large in the public imagination: it is destroying democracy, don’t ya know. Maybe.
Research from Ceren Budak and collaborators, including computational social scientist supremo Duncan Watts, published in Nature this week reveals a different reality. It’s an important paper because it unpicks the moral panic around misinformation, allowing us to address it more with our heads than with our guts.
Key findings:
Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out. Examples: 6.3% of YouTube users were responsible for 79.8% of exposure to extremist channels from July to December 2020, 85% of vaccine-sceptical content was consumed by less than 1% of US citizens in the 2016–2019 period.
Conventional wisdom blames platform algorithms for spreading misinformatio…