What we do — and don’t — know about how misinformation spreads online
Online misinformation contributed to the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty
Nature
“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 an article 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 online misinformation. It is a crucial time to highlight this subject. With more than 60 percent of the world’s population now online, false and misleading information is spreading more easily than ever, with consequences such as increased vaccine hesitancy and greater political polarization. In a year in which countries home to some 4 billion people are holding major elections, sensitivities around misinformation are only heightened.
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 a Perspective article. 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.
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