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 15 May 2023 and Monday 22 May 2023.
New:+160 Trend:+58
93,240 Fact-checking Tweets
New:+40 Trend:-24
6,130 Fact-checks
144 Fact-checking Organisations
Key Content and Provenance
During the period between Monday 15 May 2023 and Monday 22 May 2023, 160 new URLs have been identified as potential misinforming content. Out of the 302 domains identified by Fact-checking organisations (Figure 1), most of the new shared URLs were from pbs.org with an increase of +126 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 pbs.org with a change of +42 compared to the previous total spread for the same domain whereas the domain that saw the least relative change was afp.com with a change of -17 compared to the previous period.
The all time most important domain is twitter.com with a total of 183,800 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 144 fact-checking organisations.
The largest amount of fact-checked content comes from euvsdisinfo.eu (1,076 fact-checks) and the least from Verify Sy (1 fact-checks). Most fact-checked content are from VoxCheck (352) followed by Factcheck.ge (277) and AFP fact checking (263) (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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U | [‘Country in eastern europe’]. | 328 | 227 | 139686 |
| G | [‘Country in central europe’]. | 32 | 3 | 16037 |
| P | [‘Country in central europe’]. | 25 | 7 | 15852 |
| I | [‘Country in western asia’]. | 23 | 1 | 24739 |
| L | [‘Sovereign state in western asia’]. | 21 | 0 | 4700 |
| E | [‘Third planet from the sun in the solar system’]. | 17 | 12 | 18960 |
| B | [‘Capital city of iraq’]. | 12 | 6 | 14227 |
| F | [‘Country in northern europe’]. | 10 | 2 | 3549 |
| S | [‘Sculpture on liberty island in new york harbor in new york city, new york, united states’]. | 8 | 8 | 8832 |
| M | [‘Country in north america’]. | 7 | 11 | 5635 |
Table 3: Top locations mentioned in misinforming posts.
| Person | Description | Current Week | Previous Week | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U | [‘President of the european commission since 2019’]. | 148 | 84 | 5196 |
| E | [‘President of france since 2017’]. | 21 | 0 | 8066 |
| V | [‘President of russia (1999–2008, 2012–present)’]. | 18 | 24 | 63385 |
| H | [‘Ukrainian energy minister’]. | 8 | 2 | 2303 |
| M | [‘Ukrainian politician’]. | 4 | 2 | 3241 |
| B | [‘King of thailand (1927-2016)’]. | 3 | 3 | 6212 |
| A | [‘Austrian-born german politician, dictator of germany from 1933 until his death in 1945’]. | 2 | 3 | 4842 |
| P | [‘266th pope of the catholic church’]. | 2 | 2 | 2502 |
| I | [‘British actor’]. | 2 | 1 | 854 |
| J | [‘President of the united states since 2021’]. | 1 | 5 | 15860 |
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.