relationship between them excitementis now known as X and concern about misinformation European UnionHere they analyzed the main social networks and determined that the one held by businessman Elon Musk distributed a larger share of these posts than rivals such as Facebook or TikTok.
Social networks spread disinformation; They are trying to combat this situation with different measures, with more or less success, but this does not eliminate a problem that Europe understands. “It poses a threat to democracy and puts the health, safety and environment of citizens at risk.”.
This is reflected in the European Commission’s six-monthly ‘Code of Practical Advice on Disinformation’ report for September 2023, which “confirms” the work done by the most popular social networks to combat disinformation.
Special, 6,155 unique posts analyzed And 4,460 unique Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter accounts (now X) and YouTubetaking into account detectability or discoverability, the relative and absolute commitment of the publication (the engagement it gets from users), and the actors distributing this disinformation.
It is focused on three countries: Poland, Slovakia and Spain. According to data obtained from Google Trends, the most popular social network in the first two is Facebook, followed by YouTube and Instagram. In the case of Spain, YouTube leads among these platforms, while its popularity comes after Facebook and Instagram.
However, it is Twitter, the fourth social network in popularity, that obtains the most worrying data when the results of the three countries are combined: Twitter has the highest detectability rate of posts containing misinformation (0.428), above Facebook (0.313). .
Individualized analysis changes the ranking in the case of Slovakia, where Facebook (0.502) has a higher ratio than Twitter (0.436). In Poland, Twitter is the social network with the highest detectability rate (0.486), but Instagram (0.308) comes in second, slightly ahead of Facebook (0.306). In the case of Spain, Twitter leads this metric (0.367), followed by TikTok (0.266).
When looking at relative engagement, Twitter was once again the top platform in the measurement. This represents 1,977 times the average engagement with non-disinformation content, according to the report. Although it explains this “A more detailed analysis at the country level revealed that this impact was mainly attributable to Twitter’s activities in Spain.”.
The relative participation rate in this country is 3.536 (second Facebook remains at 0.833), compared to rates in Poland (0.912) and Slovakia (0.824).
Among the remaining platforms, only YouTube stands out, with a rate close to the average (1.114 out of 1.0), although it is above the average. The report points out that posts containing disinformation from other platforms show lower engagement, on average, than posts without disinformation.
But relative commitment “does not reflect the volume of commitments in absolute terms”, analyzed based on average absolute engagement per post. So the relative engagement rate determined on Twitter (1.977) comes from an average good engagement of 183.0 (without disinformation) versus an average bad engagement of 361.7 (with misinformation).
This data contrasts with the TikTok example, which achieved a low relative engagement (0.048) from an average of 7,429.7 bad interactions and an average of 155,220.7 good interactions.
The report also notes, “There is an uneven distribution of engagement across posts, particularly among disinformation posts. The five most popular disinformation posts account for one-third to two-thirds of the total engagement of all posts collected with disinformation.”
So, looking at the five most popular disinformation posts, Instagram gets 63.6% of total engagement, LinkedIn 57.6%, YouTube 54.8%, Facebook 40.7%, TikTok 39.3% and Twitter 31.5%. Expanding to the 20 most popular posts, LinkedIn has 97.3%, Instagram has 90.4%, YouTube has 85.9%, Facebook has 77.3%, TikTok has 72.3%, and Twitter has 59.7%. It reaches .
Based on all this, they find that Twitter and Facebook are the social networks with the highest discovery rate, although they show a medium level of engagement, resulting from a high ratio between disinformation content and relative engagement with it, and a more moderate absolute engagement. loyalty. .
Two video platforms, YouTube and TikTok, have low discovery rates but high engagement rates. While Instagram and LinkedIn show low discovery and low engagement.
Finally, the report on actors spreading disinformation states that Twitter and Facebook have the highest rates with 8.7 percent and 7.89 percent, respectively. YouTube shows the lowest rate with 0.8 percent.
These actors also tend to share some characteristics such as:They tend to follow a large number of users but have very few followers on their accounts Compared to actors who distribute posts without disinformation. It is also possible that they have recently joined the social network.
As a result, the report notes that “platforms with higher discoverability also had higher rates of disinformation actors. Twitter scored highest on both metrics, while YouTube scored lowest.”
It is useful to remember this