MADRID, 29 (Portaltic/EP)
Misleading content from sources posing as the media grew on social platforms Twitter and Facebook last year in the United States, despite the measures implemented by the two companies to prevent their proliferation.
Research by the German Marshall Fund shows the growth of misleading news on the most popular platforms. Its dissemination on Twitter was due to accounts that the platform had verified as real, but that shared content from sites that repeatedly published false or misleading information.
The content of these sites reached its peak in the fourth quarter of the year, with up to 47 million ‘tweets’ shared. The company recognizes the existence of the phenomenon, as indicated to Bloomberg, and indicates that for this reason, before the presidential elections in the United States, they took measures to limit participation in publications that violate the rules of the social network.
In the case of Facebook, the German Marshall Fund study found that interactions with deceptive sites last year were more than double those in the run-up to the 2016 election. This included 1.2 billion interactions with deceptive sites in the last quarter of 2020.
The study concludes that while the measures taken by the companies were helpful, they did not stop the broader trend.
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