Miguel Afonso Caetano#SocialMedia #Facebook #Misinformation #Disinformation: "We went big, collecting more than 13 million Facebook image posts from August through October 2020, from 25,000 pages and public groups. Audiences on Facebook are so concentrated that these pages and groups account for at least 94% of all engagement – likes, shares, reactions – for political image posts. We used facial recognition to identify public figures, and we tracked reposted images. We then classified large, random draws of images in our sample, as well as the most frequently reposted images.
Overall, our findings are grim: 23% of image posts in our data contained misinformation. Consistent with previous work, we found that misinformation was unequally distributed along partisan lines. While only 5% of left-leaning posts contained misinformation, 39% of right-leaning posts did.
The misinformation we found on Facebook was highly repetitive and often simple. While there were plenty of images doctored in a misleading way, these were outnumbered by memes with misleading text, screenshots of fake posts from other platforms, or posts that took unaltered images and misrepresented them."
Visual misinformation is widespread on Facebook – and often undercounted by researchers
The flood of misinformation on social media could actually be worse than many researchers have reported. The problem is that many studies analyzed only text, leaving visual misinformation uncounted.