Social Media Misinformation Statistics 2026: Reach, Belief, and Platform Response

Misinformation and disinformation ranked as the #1 short-term global risk in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024, based on the September 2023 views of more than 1,400 risk experts, policy-makers and industry leaders, and held that top short-term ranking again in the 2025 edition surveying more than 900 global leaders across business, government, academia and civil society. Back-to-back top rankings read less like an election-year spike than a standing expectation.

The signal on the demand side is just as sharp. In Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024, 59% of respondents said they were concerned about telling what is real from what is fake in online news, up 3 percentage points on the prior year, with the United States at 72% and South Africa at 81%, both election-year countries.

Key Takeaways

• Over half (58%) of Reuters Institute’s surveyed sample say they remain concerned about their ability to tell true from false in online news, according to its 2025 Digital News Report, with concern highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%) and lowest in Western Europe (46%).
• More than 1,400 global risk experts ranked misinformation and disinformation the #1 short-term risk in the World Economic Forum’s 2024 report, and the 900+ leaders surveyed for the 2025 edition kept it at the top for a second consecutive year.
• Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth on Twitter and reached their first 1,500 people six times faster, according to the 2018 Science study by MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral with Deb Roy and Soroush Vosoughi of the MIT Media Lab.
• Almost three-quarters (73%) of Canadians reported seeing content online in 2022 that they suspected to be false or inaccurate in the previous 12 months, per Statistics Canada.
• Almost half (47%) of Canadian respondents in a 2022 Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University survey could not correctly identify at least 75% of a series of misinformation statements, and the global OECD Truth Quest Survey in 2024 found respondents misidentified true and false content 40% of the time on average.
• Americans’ trust in mass media reached a record-low 31% in September 2024, with a 17-percentage-point gap by age, 43% among those aged 65 and older versus 26% for those under age 50.

Editor’s Choice

• Four-in-ten (40%) Americans who get news from social media now name inaccuracy as their biggest dislike about the experience, an increase of 9 percentage points since 2018, per Pew Research Center’s fall 2023 American Trends Panel survey.
• 5.04 billion active social media user identities existed at the start of 2024, equivalent to 62.3% of the world’s population, with the typical user spending 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social platforms, per DataReportal.
• Meta announced on January 7, 2025, that it was ending its third-party fact-checking programme in the United States and moving to a Community Notes model, later reporting a roughly 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025.
• Concern about influencers as the biggest source of online misinformation reaches 58% in Nigeria and 59% in Kenya, while politicians are named the biggest threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%) and Serbia (59%).
• Only 12% of Republicans trust the mass media a great deal or a fair amount as of September 2024, compared with 27% of independents and 54% of Democrats. Gallup’s September 3-15, 2024 poll.
• Facebook news consumption is down 4 percentage points across all Reuters Institute markets in a year, and TikTok (around 13% in 2024, 16% in 2025) has now overtaken X (around 10% in 2024, 12% in 2025) as a weekly news source.

Worth noting: Trust in the news brands positioned to correct that confusion is going the other way. Gallup’s September 2024 poll pegged American trust in the mass media at 31%, Gallup’s lowest reading on record, one point below the 32% recorded in 2016 and again in the previous year’s poll, and for the third consecutive year more U.S. adults said they had no trust at all in the media (36%) than trusted it a great deal or a fair amount.

How Widespread Is Misinformation Exposure on Social Media

• Four-in-ten Americans who get news from social media (40%) named inaccuracy as the aspect they dislike most about the experience in Pew Research Center’s fall 2023 American Trends Panel survey, an increase of 9 percentage points since 2018, with responses covering unverified facts, misinformation, “fake news” and unreliable sources.
• Almost three-quarters (73%) of Canadians reported seeing content online they suspected to be false or inaccurate in the past 12 months in 2022, per Statistics Canada.
• Over two in five (44%) Canadians typically got their news or information in 2023 from social media accounts unaffiliated with government, scientific or news organizations, per Statistics Canada.
• Over two in five (43%) Canadians said in 2023 that it had become harder to distinguish between true and false news or information compared with three years prior.
• 59% of Reuters Institute respondents said they were concerned about telling what is real from what is fake in online news in 2024, up 3 percentage points on the prior year.
• The global total of active social media user identities reached 5.04 billion at the start of 2024, equivalent to 62.3% of the world’s population, with the typical user spending 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social platforms, per DataReportal’s Digital 2024 Global Overview.

The scale is what makes even a small false-content prevalence rate consequential. With more than five billion accounts and the equivalent of more than two eight-hour workdays every week per user, even a fractional exposure rate translates to billions of encounters with suspect content each week, which is why the population-tested identification error rates in the next tables matter more than any single “% of content is fake” number.

Source: Pew Research Center 2024, Statistics Canada 2024, Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024/2025, DataReportal 2024.

How Users Rate Misinformation Risk by Platform

• Worries about how to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy content in online platforms are highest for TikTok and X compared with other online networks in Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report.
• Around one in four respondents surveyed in early 2024 said it was at least somewhat difficult to distinguish trustworthy from fake news on TikTok and X, with Facebook at 21% and Instagram at 20% saying the same.
• Facebook and Instagram, the platforms ranked next after TikTok and X on that difficulty measure, have both hosted misinformation or conspiracies around stories such as the war in Gaza and the Princess of Wales’s health, as well as so-called “deepfake” pictures and videos, per Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report.
• In the 2025 Digital News Report, Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) each reach around a third of the global sample for weekly news use, Instagram and WhatsApp both 19%, TikTok 16%, and X 12%.
• Weekly reach and difficulty telling true from false are separate measures, so the platforms users find hardest to judge are not the ones carrying the widest news reach.

Ranking, reach, and demographic detail for the networks in that table live in the companion social media platforms dataset, and the audience behind the TikTok score is broken out there by age and market.

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Recent Developments

• June 2026: the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026 recorded misinformation worry climbing again across its 48-market sample: Concerns about fake news are also up, by 4pp to 62% on average, with jumps of more than 5pp in 11 markets.
• January 7, 2025: Meta announced the end of its third-party fact-checking programme in the United States, moving to a Community Notes model, lifting restrictions on some mainstream-discourse topics and focusing enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.
• May 29, 2025: Meta’s Community Standards Enforcement Report for Q1 2025 reported a roughly 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes on its US platforms between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, with the low prevalence of violating content largely unchanged for most problem areas.
• June 17, 2025: Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 reported that over half its sample (58%) remained concerned about their ability to tell true from false in online news, with concern highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%) and lowest in Western Europe (46%).
• June 17, 2025: Trust in news across Reuters Institute markets sat at 40% and had been unchanged for the previous three years, with Finland among the highest (67%) and Hungary and Greece down at 22% each.
• September 3-15, 2024: Gallup’s annual media-trust poll returned a 31% “great deal or fair amount” reading, Gallup’s lowest reading on record, one point below the 32% recorded in 2016 and again in the previous year’s poll, with a 17-percentage-point gap between Americans aged 65 and older (43%) and those under 50 (26%).
• January 15, 2025: The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 kept misinformation and disinformation as the top short-term risk for the second consecutive year, based on the views of more than 900 global leaders.

Country-Level Concern About Online Misinformation

• Concern about telling true from false in online news reached 73% in African-market samples and 73% in the United States in Reuters Institute’s 2025 data, versus 46% in Western Europe.
• In 2024, the concern figure was 81% in South Africa, 72% in the United States and 70% in the United Kingdom, versus 45% in Norway and 42% in Germany.
• Trust in news ranged from 69% in Finland to 23% each in Greece and Hungary in Reuters Institute’s 2024 measurement.
• In the 2025 edition, Finland remained among the highest at 67%, with Hungary (22%) and Greece (22%) at the bottom, and some African countries such as Nigeria (68%) and Kenya (65%) also have high trust scores. We read those cross-region gaps as indicative rather than like-for-like, because the market samples behind them are not drawn on a common basis.
• The concern-and-trust pattern decouples along a specific line: the countries most worried about online misinformation are not usually the countries with the lowest news-brand trust.
• The United States is the extreme case, top of the Reuters concern chart while Gallup’s separate domestic series sits at its weakest media-trust reading.

How Fast False Content Spreads on Social Platforms

• Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth in a 2018 study published in Science by MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral with Deb Roy and Soroush Vosoughi of the MIT Media Lab.
• The same study found false stories reached their first 1,500 people six times faster than true stories, with the effect more pronounced for political news than other categories.
• Bots spread true and false information at the same rate in the Vosoughi study, indicating that human users hitting retweet are the primary accelerant of false content.
• A separate study co-authored by MIT Sloan marketing professor Catherine Tucker found a 75% reduction in fake news being shared after Facebook rolled out a 2017 advertising system designed to intercept articles with fake news stories.
• The velocity gap matters more than the volume gap. If a false claim reaches its first 1,500 readers six times faster than the true version, a moderation system that removes both at the same rate still leaves the false version leading by a full “news cycle” in the audience it actually reached.

Key finding: In the MIT team’s Twitter dataset, falsehoods are 70% more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth, and reach their first 1,500 people six times faster. Bots propagated true and false content at equal rates, the acceleration came from human choice, not automation.

Which Platforms Americans Use for News

• Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) each reach about a third of Reuters Institute’s global sample for weekly news use in 2025.
• Instagram and WhatsApp each reach around a fifth of the global sample for weekly news use (19% each), with TikTok at 16% and X at 12%.
• TikTok (around 13%) overtook X (around 10%) as a weekly news source for the first time in Reuters Institute’s 2024 data.
• Facebook news consumption is down 4 percentage points across all Reuters Institute markets in a year.
• News use of X was stable or increasing across many markets, with the biggest uplifts in the United States (+8 points), Australia (+6) and Poland (+6).
• Rival networks Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon reached 2% or less for news globally.

Trust in Mass Media Continues Its Long-Term Decline

• Americans’ trust in mass media stood at 31% in Gallup’s September 2024 poll, with those saying they had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
• For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults said they had no trust at all in the media (36%) than trusted it a great deal or a fair amount, with another 33% expressing “not very much” confidence.
• Trust in mass media ranged from 68% to 72% in three Gallup readings during the 1970s, and 51% to 55% in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
• Trust in news across Reuters Institute markets sat at 40% in 2025, stable for three consecutive years.
• The multi-decade Gallup series is the cleanest single measure of the trust erosion that misinformation research keeps circling. The decline predates social media by twenty years, but the plateau at record lows since 2016 mirrors the same window in which social platforms became the dominant news gateway.

Trust in Media by Political Affiliation

• Democrats’ trust in the mass media stood at 54% in Gallup’s September 2024 poll, versus 27% for independents and 12% for Republicans.
• Republican trust in mass media was at a statistically similar level to prior record lows in the same poll, while independent trust matched the record low set in 2022.
• An analysis by age groups using aggregated Gallup data showed a 17-percentage-point gap in trust between Americans aged 65 and older (43%) and those under age 50 (26%).
• Party remains the wider of the two splits in Gallup’s 2024 poll, but age is the one that maps most directly to social-versus-legacy news consumption, which makes it the split worth watching as social platforms take more of the news gateway.

Who the Public Blames for Online Misinformation

• Online influencers and personalities are named as the biggest source of false or misleading information by 47% of the Reuters Institute global sample in 2025, tied with national politicians (47%).
• Concern about influencers as the biggest misinformation source reaches 58% in Nigeria and 59% in Kenya.
• Politicians are considered the biggest misinformation threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), Serbia (59%), Slovakia (56%), and Hungary (54%).
• AI chatbots and interfaces emerged as a news source in the 2025 Reuters Institute survey, with 7% of respondents using them for news each week overall and 15% of under-25s.
• The public is divided over whether social media companies should be removing content, per Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report.

Regional patterns diverge sharply on who is named. Naming influencers as the biggest threat peaks in African markets like Kenya (59%) and Nigeria (58%); naming politicians peaks in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), and much of Eastern Europe, including Serbia (59%), Slovakia (56%), and Hungary (54%). For companion background on false-content velocity, see our fake news statistics.

The Rise of Social Video as a News Source

• The share of Reuters Institute’s global sample consuming social video for news grew from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025, with any video (short or long) growing from 67% to 75%.
• In the Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, and India, more people say they prefer to watch the news rather than read it, per Reuters Institute’s 2025 data.
• 15% of Americans access at least one podcast a week, with many now filmed and distributed via YouTube and TikTok, per Reuters Institute’s 2025 measurement.
• Short news videos are accessed by two-thirds (66%) of the Reuters Institute 2024 global sample each week, with longer formats attracting around half (51%).
• The main locus of news video consumption is online platforms (72%) rather than publisher websites (22%), per Reuters Institute’s 2024 data.

Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025. Both years are Reuters-published endpoints; the report gives no intermediate annual values for either series, so none are plotted.

The shift toward video-native, personality-led feeds is what makes influencer-sourced misinformation a rising rather than falling risk category. Adjacent coverage of AI content generation itself sits in our AI tools usage data.

How Platforms Have Changed Misinformation Moderation

• Meta announced on January 7, 2025, that it was ending its third-party fact-checking programme in the United States, moving to a Community Notes model and lifting restrictions on some topics the company described as “part of mainstream discourse”.
• Meta reported a roughly 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes on its US platforms between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 in its Community Standards Enforcement Report update on May 29, 2025.
• In the same Q4 2024 → Q1 2025 window, Meta reported that the low prevalence of violating content largely remained unchanged for most problem areas, the company’s own framing of the moderation trade-off.
• MIT Sloan’s Catherine Tucker and co-authors found a 75% reduction in fake news being shared after Facebook rolled out a new advertising system in 2017, the closest historical comparator to Meta’s 2025 pivot, and a case where a change on the advertising side rather than the editorial side coincided with a large drop in sharing.
• Meta reported a roughly 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes on its US platforms from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, with the low prevalence of violating content largely unchanged for most problem areas. That shift and the 2017 Facebook advertising system change sit at opposite ends of the moderation dial.

The takeaway: Meta framed its January 2025 change as a correction of over-enforcement: we saw a roughly 50% reduction in enforcement mistakes on our platforms in the United States from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025 – during that same time period, the low prevalence of violating content largely remained unchanged for most problem areas. Fewer enforcement mistakes and steady prevalence is the trade the company is claiming.

What Percentage of Social Media Content Is Misinformation

No source measures a single “percentage of social media content that is misinformation,” and any figure that claims to should be treated with caution. What primary data does measure is population-tested identification error and self-reported exposure.

• The OECD Truth Quest Survey conducted in 2024 found respondents, on average, misidentified true and false content they were presented with 40% of the time; and more trust in social media as a news source was associated with a reduced ability to correctly identify content.
• The Survey of Online Harms in Canada, conducted in 2022 by the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University, found that almost half of respondents (47%) were unable to correctly identify at least 75% of a series of misinformation statements they were presented with, and about one in six (15%) could correctly identify 25% or fewer, the latter group was, in the Dais summary, “less trusting of mainstream news, more likely to trust social media and use it for news, and less likely to fact-check.”.

The realistic answer to the question is: unknown as a share of total content, but measurable as an error rate in the population that consumes it, roughly two in five decisions wrong on the OECD test, and roughly one in two Canadians unable to clear a 75% correct threshold. For deeper background on how those numbers connect to legacy media, see our internet statistics reference.

Should Social Media Companies Be Responsible for Misinformation

Public opinion on platform responsibility is split. Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report finds the public divided over whether social media companies should be removing content, which leaves open where the limits of moderation should sit. Meta’s own framing, in its January 2025 announcement of the shift to Community Notes, positions the company as ending the third-party fact-checking programme in the United States, lifting restrictions on some mainstream-discourse topics, and focusing enforcement on “illegal and high-severity violations”, an explicit narrowing of the platform-responsibility perimeter.

The regulatory picture is diverging by geography rather than converging. Meta’s US pivot narrows corporate responsibility toward high-severity categories. Two years from now the same platforms will be running two visibly different moderation regimes on the same content, and the measurement question the Reuters Institute is best positioned to answer will be whether the concern-and-trust gap narrows in one region and widens in the other.

Conclusion

The numeric picture on social media misinformation is a paradox in three parts: over half of Reuters Institute’s global sample (58%) say they are concerned about their ability to tell true from false online, Meta has replaced third-party fact-checking with Community Notes in the United States, and the news brands positioned to correct the confusion sit at 31% trust in Gallup’s US measurement. The World Economic Forum’s back-to-back top short-term-risk rankings for misinformation and disinformation are the clearest signal that the practitioner consensus and the audience data have converged.

The trend to watch is whether Meta’s narrower US moderation perimeter produces a measurable shift in Reuters Institute’s platform-level concern figures, and whether the audience-level identification error rates move as AI-generated content becomes a larger share of what those audiences see. Policymakers weighing the US/EU divergence, platform-safety teams calibrating enforcement, and educators building media-literacy programmes are the readers with the most direct use for the numbers above.