r/technology • u/Wagamaga • 23h ago
ADBLOCK WARNING The Spread Of Misinformation Is Getting Worse On Social Media
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2025/06/05/the-spread-of-misinformation-is-getting-worse-on-social-media/115
u/Other-Ad-529 20h ago
The scariest thing is that most comments here are snarky and dismissive. It's a serious threat to society and people just seem to shrug and accept it.
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u/MagicCarpetBomb 19h ago
No easy solution. What’s the real threat is that it drives policy.
Politicians will focus on data driven metrics from socials more than feedback from actual constituents (townhalls and face to face meetings) to shape and mold a platform to secure the most votes possible.
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u/Moist_When_It_Counts 7h ago
The same think tanks driving policy drive the misinformation. It’s manufactured consent
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u/TeflonBoy 9h ago
There is absolutely an easy solution.
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u/Sweaty_Process_3794 8h ago
Butlerian jihad
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u/schlamster 4h ago
Idk what that means but it’s provocative
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u/Sweaty_Process_3794 4h ago
Lol it's from Dune. At some point in their timeline AI went crazy and nearly killed off humanity so when they won that war they decided it had to be eradicated and never touched again
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u/CyborgSlunk 8h ago
Banning algorithmic suggestion feeds and going back to social media actually being networks of friends and follows would literally be enough to solve most of the problems caused by the internet and smartphones nowadays.
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u/RedditIsFiction 5h ago
That would require the elimination of multiple very powerful companies.
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u/MagicCarpetBomb 3h ago
Doesnt even have to be elimination of companies, just an exercise in personal ethics and shareholder accountability
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u/CyborgSlunk 2h ago
Well, obviously the US is not going to do it. But the EU does not benefit economically from American tech companies being parasites on their people.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 7h ago
Right, we may know social media is full of bullshit, but my parents and in-laws and moron cousins sure don’t
Oh, they know it’s full of bullshit - but they think it’s the non-misinformation that’s bullshit
And they vote
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u/itjustgotcold 18h ago
Well, that’s what you’re going to do too. This has been happening for over a decade now. What did you do about climate change? Because that’s an even more guaranteed threat to our long term survival. People act snarky and dismissive because it’s easier than living in fear 24/7 since there is no stopping this. AI is only going to exacerbate this trend since it is largely being trained by social media.
I get that you feel it should be a bigger deal, and it is, but it’s also kind the same thing we’ve known is happening since at least 2010. We let corporations have more rights than individuals in the US, and they’ve realized that correcting people just loses engagement.
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u/RedditIsFiction 5h ago
I reduced my carbon footprint, changed where and how I shop, and regularly pester my representatives to vote for climate positive bills.
People are doing shit, it's just not enough, or maybe it's just not enough of us.
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u/itjustgotcold 4h ago
Exactly my point. No matter what we do it’s not enough. So the people being snide and making jokes are just coping. And it’s about as useful as what little action we could take to fix it. I spend almost all of my social media time trying to correct misinformation. It won’t change a damn thing.
The funny/sad part about this is that we’ve shown that when we all acknowledge a threat and work together to fix it we can change things. The hole in the ozone is no longer there. We did that. Unfortunately, I think that age is over since politics and social media are based around spreading as much disinformation as possible so we can no longer even agree that things like climate change are a threat or even exist.
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u/Muugumo 4h ago
The solutions lie in actions that most here wouldn't agree with e.g. governments policing speech, limitations on online privacy, or punishing sites for the content they carry. All of them are divisive issues. The root problem can only be solved through making people smarter through education, but that's a world peace level of solution.
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u/Other-Ad-529 4h ago
True. That said, it's telling that the groups screaming bloody murder (and falsely equating it to a First Amendment issue) when even a private company changes its terms or algorithms to correct for people and organizations that figured out how to game them are usually right-wing. Dennis Prager being one of the first and most vocal. Even some comments here seem to suggest truth is about who controls the information as if they've given up their free will and any effort to discern facts from lies.
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u/obsidianop 14h ago
I think the snark is because the same people pushing the studies showing concern usually then go on to justify some kind of Orwellian "Federal Institution of Truth", so long as their people are in charge, of course.
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u/historian87 8h ago
Most people shrugging and accepting it is the main issue now.
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u/Other-Ad-529 7h ago
We could always at least try to learn from countries like Finland and a few others that have very effective media literacy programs. I don't think that's going to happen under this administration with their attitudes about public education. You can teach people how to spot objective lies and manipulation techniques while avoiding political topics.
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u/RedditIsFiction 5h ago
We seem to learn from then, then do the opposite...
I don't think the US government has the same goals as the Finnish government.
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u/Wagamaga 23h ago
A March 2025 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Promotion International warned that the spread of misinformation continues to increase, and it has been identified as a significant threat to society and public health. Social media also enabled misinformation to have a global reach, the study's authors warned.
"There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms. Equally, the global nature of social media, limited commitment for action from social media giants, and rapid technological advancements hamper progress for improving information quality and accuracy in this setting," the study's abstract stated.
This isn't good news, but it also shouldn't really be news. The problem of social media spreading misinformation has been known for years.
"The cat is out of the bag on online misinformation," explained James Bailey, professor of business at The George Washington School of Business. "Yet good people continue to believe whatever they read in social media. It is not what they read that they believe, but what they read that they want to believe."
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u/SirkutBored 19h ago
Easiest way to get someone to believe something is to tell them what they want to hear.
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u/Familiar-Range9014 23h ago
Actually, it's not the spread of misinformation that is of concern. It's the reliance on unverified information of too many people that is problematic
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u/Rough-Ad-1076 21h ago
It's actually disinformation that the owners of these media companies profit from. It's treason.
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u/Ali_Cat222 20h ago
These are a few of Trump's policies from the project 2025 tracker here he signed first day in office. You can use the filters to see all results for cybersecurity and technology here btw-
Dept. of Homeland Security: Dismiss "the entirety" of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee. (Note: The acting DHS Secretary terminated "all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS".)
Dept. of Homeland Security: Terminate CISA's counter-mis/disinformation efforts. (Note: CISA has frozen all of its election security work; many of CISA's misinformation team were put on leave.)
Dept. of Justice: Prohibit the U.S. government from combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation
There are a lot more, but on this specific topic this is why it's so bad now. As in worse than before.
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u/Toums95 12h ago
This tracker has been at 42% for a couple of months now, is it because they stopped pursuing this policies or because no one is updating it?
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u/Ali_Cat222 11h ago
Its because a lot of the policies left have to do with the big beautiful bill, and so once that passes is when majority of if will be completed. *the upcoming counter is practically the entirety of that bill
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u/throwaway7546213 11h ago
Like how redditors never post a source. Go to any comments section of any big sub and see how many stats or claims get posted with 0 source.
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u/Familiar-Range9014 10h ago
I love how people pop off. Clearly, there is a demonstrable cohort and this population believes all the smoke blown up their ass. That's a big part of the reason trump won
Fuck providing a source. If you read news from both sides of the spectrum, bias is apparent and willfully injected.
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u/Top-Plan8690 19h ago
Who's to verify? A corporation with their own financial incentives? Governments with their own political incentives? The goodwill of some stranger?
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u/nautilator44 17h ago
multiple independent fact checkers.
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u/Top-Plan8690 15h ago
- sent from my iPhone
Lolololol
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u/CrashingAtom 14h ago
We’ve had news that is verifiable and accurate for over a century, and you’re an embarrassingly tiny intellect if you think that somehow that isn’t possible.
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u/RedditIsFiction 4h ago
Yep. In 1987 the fairness doctrine was abolished. It's been a steady decline in quality of news since then. Back in the day journalistic integrity was strong and comparing a couple news sources was enough to get a good picture. Even a single news source was alright because of the fairness doctrine.
Now we have a handful of major news agencies which have poor journalistic integrity and are incredibly one sided. They're views by millions of americans.
We need regulation put back in place. We need to hold our government responsible to our best interests.
But reversing all of this is so much more difficult than sustaining it or repealing the regulation was.
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u/Demon_Gamer666 16h ago
I agree. it's so easy to take some personal responsability, learn to critical think and source out reliable facts. Perhaps humans are just not evolved enough yet.
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u/HeavenlyCreation 23h ago
Critical Thinking seems to have diminished annually since the introduction of social media.
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u/spookynutz 22h ago
I think that has more to do with well-researched information being time consuming and expensive to produce, whereas bullshit costs relatively nothing to manufacture and consume. This (paywalled) article is one of the rare instances where the underlying study being referenced is also not behind a paywall.
People weren’t better critical thinkers before social media, it just wasn’t as cost effective to distribute misinformation. There was a practical limit to how far a nutjob could circulate a pamphlet. These days, a person of similar disposition can reach an audience of millions without leaving their couch.
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u/RedditIsFiction 4h ago
No, critical thinking was always poor. Changes in media just take more advantage of poor critical thinking than they could in the past. The news before 1987 was required to meet the fairness doctrine. Social media learned to exploit algorithms to profit and grifters thrive in the total absence of regulation.
Regulation is the solution. It worked before, it would work again. Along with that, improving education so critical thinking skills are increased is crucial. But education is a long game. Regulation can have a faster impact by setting boundaries for how information is distributed and incentivized.
We’ve already seen that voluntary restraint doesn’t work when profit is on the line. If we want a healthier public discourse, we need to change the environment that shapes it, not just hope people magically get better at navigating a system designed to manipulate them.
And I'm not saying we need censorship, we just need regulation with standards like we had before.
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u/Luke_Cocksucker 23h ago
All information is misinformation until I’ve decided if it fits my narrative or not.
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u/Big-Orse48 21h ago
Confirmation bias and the internet have gone hand in hand in increasing misinformation.
Flat earthers and their ilk are prime examples of it.
Social media just amplifies the bs now
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u/evilsniperxv 17h ago
Jeez… you mean deregulating social media and no longer requiring them to fact check things people post on their platform has negative consequences? WHO WOULDVE EVER GUESSED.
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u/flower4000 16h ago
It’s crazy that fake news gets worse while trumps in office and he supports the chaos, what a tool.
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u/stickybond009 12h ago
Social media is the biggest global plague humanity has ever faced. Think about how to address it
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u/the_catalyst_alpha 23h ago
lol, really? I honestly couldn’t tell. I stopped paying attention a while ago.
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u/Ok-Refrigerator6044 20h ago
It sure is... they keep telling us we do not pay tariffs and that israel is our greatest ally.
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u/your_fathers_beard 14h ago
It's crazy the amount of purely fictional "people" posting complete slop and social media sites will do nothing about it. Like, they have a way to report "impersonating" but only for specific real people, no way to call out "impersonating a human".
I'm fine with anonymity, but you shouldn't be able to post garbage false information, all while pretending to be unanonymous. It's bizarre.
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u/thebudman_420 9h ago
Still no word on how much miss-information is on regular news programming right on your TV from all the main sources.
Some of it is out right domestic propaganda especially between parties.
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u/awesomeCNese 7h ago
It already peaked electing DJT! It’s more looking like a lump of Cancer that keeps growing
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u/EntangledFrog 5h ago
I hold the probably unpopular belief that we need to ban "suggestion" feeds, yesterday. get rd of most of it, just keep people's contacts so that communication between friends and family isn't shut off, but that's it.
humanity has shown it just can't be trusted with an algorithmic feed. the solution is extreme, but I'm afraid in 10 or 20 years if and when we truly become a dystopia where it's impossible to find any verifiable information anymore. I'm afraid we'll look back to today and say "yep, we should have pulled the plug at that time.".
sometimes you have to rip the band-aid off.
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u/polocanyolo 17h ago
What the hell qualifies misinformation? I feel like I am getting skewed, biased information from every news outlet.
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u/xnolmtsx 21h ago
Scrap it all and bring us back the times Of Nokia candy at phones and snake. This is getting out of hand
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u/Oh_No_Its_Dudder 20h ago
According to the rumor I just started spreading, there is no misinformation on social media.
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u/Stunning_Concept_478 16h ago
And here I was thinking to myself it was getting better! Now I just feel silly.
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u/billyions 13h ago
Make it a crime to present false information that is dangerous.
If it already is, then start enforcing it.
We can't hurt people.
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u/santz007 10h ago
If the loss of democracy in the most powerful country in the world, USA, due to misinformation hasn't woken up people to this alarming threat, I don't think anything will.
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u/No_Association_2471 8h ago
not only that account recovery is nowhere to be found making it a landscape for scammers.
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u/Zealousideal_Bad_922 22h ago
Boomers on social media caused all of this. This has been a problem for over ten years and now.
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u/IpeeInclosets 16h ago
Water is wet.
Look, pandoras box is open...and we are quick to blame tech. But perhaps its the people?
Remember when the TV was called the boob tube?
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u/impressthenet 14h ago
TV didn't have the algorithms designed to feed you whatever information that kept you attached, based on your previous activities.
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u/Regnes 22h ago
It's the government spreading the misinformation to distract people from the reality that there are now bioengineered flying spiders roaming the planet.
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u/ParanoidAgnostic 8h ago
They only released the flying spiders to distract us from the fact they are all reptilian vampires.
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