Twitter, Facebook Had Even More Deceptive News in 2020, Study Says
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Content from discredited websites that masquerade as journalism proliferated on Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. in 2020 despite the companies’ efforts to stem disinformation, according to research from the German Marshall Fund.
On Twitter, the spread of deceptive websites was driven by accounts that have been verified as real but tweet out content from other sites that repeatedly post false or misleading information. This phenomenon was at an “all-time high” in the final quarter of last year, when content from those sites was tweeted out 47 million times. “Deceptive sites have increased their reach at a faster rate than other web content,” the research found.