Misinformation has reached such considerable proportions that even Donald Trump’s frequent and often incoherent ramblings are being labeled as wholly unreliable.  The issue of the reliability of what we read on social media has seldom been more prescient.

Researchers from the University of Michigan examined social media content during the presidential election and found that the amount of dubious content not only rose on topics related to the election during that period, but also on a range of other topics too.

The researchers developed a tool, known as the Iffy Quotient, which aims to identify the success social media sites are having in slowing the spread of misinformation.  The tool revealed that there was considerable content from dubious sources concerning things such as racism and protests, and that content in these areas was three times as prevalent as that concerning COVID-19.

By contrast, news from more authentic sources during this period tended to be dominated by the pandemic, with the researchers regarding these sources as having basic standards of both credibility and transparency.

“You might think that COVID-19 would be the topic of the most popular iffy news URLs on Facebook and Twitter while the pandemic marches on,” the researchers say. “But those stories, while popular, were actually overshadowed by iffy site content on other timely topics.”

Dodgy information

The Iffy Quotient tool determines the proportion of the most popular web pages on both Facebook and Twitter that come from sites known for misinformation.  The popular URLs are generated by the NewsWhip service, with the reliability ratings for each site provided by a partnership of NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check.

The analysis found that 11% of the most popular iffy URLs on the two sites were related to the pandemic, whereas 33% were related to racism, protests, and riots.  These, along with the presidential election, accounted for nearly 60% of the most popular stories.

The researchers remark that there has been a clear shift during the pandemic, as whereas in the early months there was a clear desire to hear from reputable sources, such as CNN, the New York Times, PBS, and The Economist, this has shifted during autumn.

“The observed flight to quality in popular social media URLs was encouraging, but unfortunately the spread of misinformation and other iffy content has certainly continued to proliferate on both Facebook and Twitter,” the researchers say.

While the Iffy Quotient is designed to express the flow of iffy content, it tracks content from sites that are considered by NewsGuard or Media Bias/Fact Check to be “OK” as well—sites that may include, but are not limited to, mainstream news sources.

Over that same period, about 37% of popular URLs from OK sites were related to COVID-19, roughly 29% were about U.S. race-related issues, and about 10% were U.S. presidential election-themed. Here the percentage of COVID-19 stories was the single largest percentage by topic and also over a third of all stories.