Desinformationsakteure verbreiten täglich 1,5 Milliarden Fake-News-Beiträge….

ID Crypt Global has analysed data from Code of Practice on Disinformation report from TrustLab to understand the rate at which disinformation is being spread through the six main social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube – before conducting its own analysis estimating how many disinformation posts are being created each day, and which platforms are most responsible for the spread of fake news and media.

The most recent available data* estimates that there are an estimated total of 10.5 billion social media users across the six main platforms.

Facebook boasts the most users with 3 billion people logging onto the platform each month. Facebook is followed by YouTube (2.5bn), Instagram (2bn), TikTok (1.5bn), LinkedIn (771m), and X (619m).

How do I know this isn’t fake?

There are some decisions we need to make and abide by as a society living in the internet age. When anyone can say anything, which voices should be more authoritative, trustworthy, and rise above rest? How do we balance freedom of speech for everyone vs using social media as a platform of influence for everyone? What framework should be put in place to help facilitate those preferences. All questions that it’ll probably take a decade or more to generally agree on, and then another decade or more to build the frameworks to support… so gear up for a few more decades of this.

On a related note, I watched Neil DeGrasse Tyson address this once with an interesting alternative: right now people assume the posts and “evidence” they see for crazy things like PizzaGate, however flimsy, are real because it at least took some work or research to generate. In a world where AI can allow anyone to create deepfakes, fake images, AI-generated articles, etc, the line between what’s real and what isn’t will be indistinguishable… no one will trust anything and the internet will implode under the weight of its own misinformation. Maybe something like that will force a solution faster.