The Fact-checking Observatory is an automatic service that collects misinforming content on Twitter using URLs that have been identified as potential misinformation by fact-checking websites. Using this data, the Fact-checking Observatory automatically generates weekly reports that updates the state of misinformation spread of fact-checked misinformation on Twitter.
This analysis is limited to URLs identified by Fact-checking organisations. The collected data only consist of non-blocked Twitter content and may be incomplete.
This report updates the status of misinformation spread between Monday 08 August 2022 and Monday 15 August 2022.
New:+8,474 Trend:-355
78,044 Fact-checking Tweets
New:+269 Trend:+98
4,227 Fact-checks
140 Fact-checking Organisations
Key Content and Provenance
During the period between Monday 08 August 2022 and Monday 15 August 2022, 8,474 new URLs have been identified as potential misinforming content. Out of the 249 domains identified by Fact-checking organisations (Figure 1), most of the new shared URLs were from facebook.com with an increase of +8,417 compared to the previous total spread for the same domain The domain that saw the least increase in spread compared to the previous period total spread was 15min.lt with a change of +0 compared to the previous total spread for the same domain
In relation to the previous week, the domain that saw the biggest relative spread change was stopfake.org with a change of +53 compared to the previous total spread for the same domain whereas the domain that saw the least relative change was twitter.com with a change of -216 compared to the previous period.
The all time most important domain is facebook.com with a total of 496,191 URL shares and the least popular domain is 24-post.com with 1 shares (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Domain importance.
Figure 2: Amount of domains shares per week.
The top misinforming content and fact-checking articles shared since the last report are listed in Table 1 and Table 2.
Table 1: Top misinforming content.
Table 2: Top fact-checked content.
Fact-Checkers and Spreaders Location
The data used for creating the Twitter dataset is obtained from 140 fact-checking organisations.
The largest amount of fact-checked content comes from VoxCheck (350 fact-checks) and the least from Verify Sy (1 fact-checks). Most fact-checked content are from euvsdisinfo.eu (335) followed by LeadStories (255) and AFP fact checking (201) (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Amount of fact-checks by fact-checkers.
Figure 4: Identified location of users spreading fact-checks and misinformation.
Locations and Mentions
Using automatic entity extraction methods, we identify key locations and persons mention in the fact-checking articles in order to identify what location and person are the most discussed in misinforming content.
The top mentioned locations and persons are listed in Table 3 and Table 4.
| Location | Description | Current Week | Previous Week | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ukraine | Country in eastern europe. | 264 | 386 | 152009 |
| Soviet Union | Communist state in eurasia from 1922 to 1991. | 105 | 10 | 9670 |
| United States of America | Country located mainly in north america. | 84 | 69 | 34119 |
| Belarus | Sovereign state in eastern europe. | 84 | 14 | 6690 |
| Russia | Sovereign state in eastern europe and northern asia. | 82 | 60 | 24543 |
| Europe | Continent. | 67 | 25 | 35608 |
| Kazakhstan | Sovereign state in eastern europe and central asia. | 51 | 0 | 355 |
| Alchevsk | City in luhansk province, ukraine. | 49 | 0 | 288 |
| Moscow | Capital and most populous city of russia. | 36 | 34 | 10660 |
| Germany | Country in central europe. | 19 | 253 | 10810 |
Table 3: Top locations mentioned in misinforming posts.
| Person | Description | Current Week | Previous Week | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joe Biden | President of the united states since 2021. | 51 | 0 | 4946 |
| Bashar al-Assad | President of syria. | 49 | 0 | 908 |
| Vladimir Putin | President of russia (1999–2008, 2012–present). | 43 | 14 | 58101 |
| António Guterres | Secretary-general of the united nations. | 33 | 15 | 494 |
| Donald Trump | President of the united states from 2017 to 2021. | 27 | 3 | 1899 |
| Steven L. Johnson | Researcher. | 23 | 1 | 212 |
| Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Sixth and current president of ukraine. | 20 | 14 | 52707 |
| Vadym Melnyk | Footballer. | 12 | 1 | 914 |
| Sergey Shoygu | Russian political figure. | 10 | 1 | 119 |
| Margarita Simonyan | Russian journalist. | 10 | 1 | 14 |
Table 4: Top people mentioned in misinforming posts.
Demographic Impact
Using automatic methods, Twitter account demographics are extracted for user age, gender and account type (i.e., identify if an account belong to an individual or organisation).
Figure 6 displays how misinformation and fact-checks are spread by different demographics.
Figure 5: Misinformation and Fact-check spread for different demographics. Top: Gender, Center: Age group, Bottom: Account type.
Data Collection and Methodology
The full methodology and information about the limitation and dataset used for this analysis can be accessed in the methodology page.