"Misinformation on Facebook Got Six Times More Clicks Than Factual News During The 2020 Election, Study Says"
Researchers at New York University and Université Grenoble Alpes in France conducted a new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election. The forthcoming peer-reviewed study reports that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform, as did trustworthy news sources. The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral and that misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. The study also found that publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories. The NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a broad group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts. In response, Facebook said that the report measured the number of people who engage with content, but that is not a measure of the number of people that actually view it (Facebook does not make the latter number, called impressions, publicly available to researchers).