Misinformation on Social Media

The goals of this guide are to:

• Provide an overview of misinformation in the digital environment, specifically social media
• Explain how aspects of misinformation and social media interact to increase the spread and impact of misinformation
• Describe strategies for reducing the impact of misinformation on social media
• Provide resources for instructors to teach students how to navigate information on social media

For those who want an overview of the problem of misinformation on social media and the factors that contribute to it, please read through the guide from start to finish using the navigation on the left side of the page.

For those looking for guidance on specific aspects of misinformation or social media, or for teaching resources on misinformation on social media, please use the tabs on the left.

Misinformation is not new. People have been creating, disseminating, and being fooled by false information since long before the printing press (Otis, 2020). 

What is new is that:

• Digital media enables information to travel faster than earlier forms of media.
• Digital media enables information to reach more people than earlier forms of media.
• Social media enables more people to produce, share, and access information than ever before because:
  • The global population is significantly larger.
  • There are far fewer gatekeeping mechanisms to limit the spread of information.
     

Studies show that most students and adults struggle to successfully evaluate the credibility of the information they see online (Breakstone et al., 2018, p. 219).

Some of the most common struggles observed in students are:

• Focusing on surface features
  • A "professional-looking" website does not signify credibility, but students have consistently identified this as an indicator of a trustworthy source of information (Breakstone et al., 2018, pp. 219-220).
• Accepting evidence unquestioningly
  • Students often say that the presence of charts, images, infographics, or videos suggests credibility, but they do not verify that the evidence itself is real or actually supports the claims being made (Breakstone et al., 2018, pp. 219-220).
• Relying on flawed heuristics
  • Students believe that .edu or .org domains are inherently more trustworthy than .com domains (Wineburg et al., 2020, p. 9)
    • On the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 “Hate Map”, 49% of hate group websites had a .org domain (Wineburg et al., 2020, p. 9)