The Dissemination of Verified False Information on Facebook in Europe

The next speaker in this session at the ICA 2024 conference is the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, who shifts our attention to the dissemination of verified false content on Facebook in the EU (and UK). This seeks to examine also the patterns of engagement with such content (rather than mere posting), and to do so draws on the Facebook URL Shares dataset.

The URL Shares dataset covers all URLs shared on Facebook that were shared more than 100 times on the platform, and adds monthly exposure and engagement data for some 48 countries and broad age groups and gender categories, but remains somewhat generic and may be less useful for countries with smaller population sizes.

Verified false content is content that has been rated as false by third-party fact-checkers organised in the International Fact-Checking Network. There was considerably more such content circulating in France, Spain, Germany, and Poland, and there were also significant gender differences, with women overall more likely to view problematic content as a proportion of all users, but men viewing such content disproportionately more in comparison to non-problematic.

Incidence of such content also comes and goes over time, largely in sync with major events from the Hamburg G20 meeting through the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic or the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, while some events – like the 2019 EU election – generated no obvious spikes in verified false content dissemination.

There are also significant topical differences between age groups – younger users are more focussed on sensational disinformation related to drugs and sex, while older users are more engaged wth health-related disinformation. These are also distributed very differently across the different regions of Europe.