And Don T Know About How Misinformation Spreads Online Nature

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 5, 2025, 7:11 PM

and don t know about how misinformation spreads online nature

You have full access to this article via your institution. Online misinformation contributed to the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots.Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty “The Holocaust did happen. COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 US presidential election.” These are three statements of indisputable fact. Indisputable — and yet, in some quarters of the Internet, hotly disputed.

They appear in a Comment article1 by cognitive scientist Ullrich Ecker at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his colleagues, one of series of articles in this issue of Nature dedicated to... It is a crucial time to highlight this subject. With more than 60% of the world’s population now online, false and misleading information is spreading more easily than ever, with consequences such as increased vaccine hesitancy2 and greater political polarization3. In a year in which countries home to some four billion people are holding major elections, sensitivities around misinformation are only heightened. Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think Furthermore, social media organizations need to provide corrections to misinformation and point out that information may be wrong or misleading.

Second, the findings highlight the importance of media literacy education (Chen et al., 2022; Fendt et al., 2023). These media literacy programs should promote critical thinking skills and provide concrete strategies and techniques individuals can deploy for fact-checking and verifying information. Online misinformation contributed to the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots.Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty “The Holocaust did happen. COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 US presidential election.” These are three statements of indisputable fact.

Indisputable — and yet, in some quarters of the Internet, hotly disputed. They appear in a Comment article1 by cognitive scientist Ullrich Ecker at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his colleagues, one of series of articles in this issue of Nature dedicated to... It is a crucial time to highlight this subject. With more than 60% of the world’s population now online, false and misleading information is spreading more easily than ever, with consequences such as increased vaccine hesitancy2 and greater political polarization3. In a year in which countries home to some four billion people are holding major elections, sensitivities around misinformation are only heightened. Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think

Yet common perceptions about misinformation and what well-grounded research tells us don’t always agree, as Ceren Budak at the University of Michigan School of Information in Ann Arbor and her colleagues point out in... The degree to which people are exposed tends to be overestimated, as does the influence of algorithms in dictating this exposure. And a focus on social media often means that wider societal and technological trends that contribute to misinformation are ignored. This report summarises some of the processes underlying the spread of false material on social media. It positions the research and findings within the broader literature relevant to online political disinformation and considers what we currently do and don’t know about the problem. It conceptualises disinformation as false material created and disseminated with the intent of deceiving others and causing harm and focuses specifically on the distribution of that material via social media platforms.

This is distinct from other elements of online information operations, such as selective presentation of true material or other forms of polarising or ‘hyperpartisan’ communication. 21st July 2020 was notable for the publication of two reports from UK Parliamentary committees. The first was from the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS Committee, 2020) on ‘Misinformation in the COVID-19 Infodemic’, which expanded on ‘Disinformation and Fake News’ previously from the Committee... The second was the long-awaited ‘Russia Report’ from the Intelligence and Security Committee (2020). While considerably broader in scope, it again noted the problem of political disinformation. It pointed to the use of social media as a tool of disinformation and influence campaigns in support of Russian foreign policy objectives.

It is not just parliamentary committees or academic researchers who think this matters. A recent survey (Newman et al., 2020) indicated that around the world, the majority of people were “concerned about what is real and fake on the internet when it comes to news”. Ironically, much of the spread of false information can be attributed to those very people. Once false material is published online, it can then be spread to very wide audiences through the phenomenon of ‘organic reach’. While bot networks and ‘coordinated inauthentic activity’ are important, everyday human behaviour may actually account for a great deal of the spread of false material (Vosoughi, Roy and Aral, 2018). People who encounter the material may share it to their own networks of contacts, friends, and family.

Even if they don’t deliberately share it, interacting with the material in other ways, such as ‘liking’ it, may cause a social network’s algorithms to increase its visibility. The people who subsequently see it may then share it to their own social networks, potentially leading to an exponential rise in its visibility. Research has suggested that relatively few people (maybe less than 10% of social media users) actively share false material they encounter online (Guess, Nagler and Tucker, 2019). Even so, this small proportion of users can significantly increase the reach of false information. Therefore, it is important to understand who extends the organic reach of disinformation, and why. The answers to those questions will help inform the development of effective interventions.

Ullrich Ecker is a professor at the School of Psychological Science and a fellow at the Public Policy Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Jon Roozenbeek is assistant professor in psychology and security at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. Sander van der Linden is a professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, UK. Li Qian Tay is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Medicine and Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. John Cook is a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Reflecting back on 2024 and looking forward to a future with less misinformation and more facts, Just Facts has summarized 50 false or misleading claims spread by journalists, commentators, and so-called fact checkers during...

Each of these examples quotes a specific media outlet or individual, but nearly all of these fictions were propagated by multiple outlets and people, and many of them were broadcast by dozens. Margaret Brennan and John Dickerson of CBS News claimed that “the president of the United States has nothing to do with the price of bacon,” “or eggs,” “or gas,” “or any of it.” In fact, presidents impact the prices of virtually everything through federal deficits that spur inflation, regulations that prohibit the use of cost-effective production methods and resources, price and wage controls, trade deals, tariffs, and... Reporting on the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump, George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz of ABC News claimed that Trump “contributed” to “violent rhetoric” because he said “it’s going to be a bloodbath” if...

And Don T Know About How Misinformation Spreads Online Nature

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