Misinformation is encountered across social feeds, video platforms, messaging groups, conversations, and health content. Recent surveys measure both exposure and trust: 43% of UK adults said they had seen some form of misinformation or disinformation in the previous four weeks, while 85% of citizens across 16 countries said they were worried about online disinformation. The figures below show how the problem varies by platform, topic, age, gender, and country.
Contents
- How often people encounter misinformation
- Where deepfakes appear
- What deepfakes depict
- Election news and the difficulty of judging truth
- Public concern and the role of social media
- Health misinformation and creator credibility
- Trust, news fatigue, and cross-country differences
How often people encounter misinformation
Ofcom’s Understanding misinformation 2024 measured what UK adults had encountered during the previous four weeks. The results indicate that exposure is common, but different formats are not equally frequent:
- 43% said they had seen some form of misinformation or disinformation.
- 41% said they had seen written misinformation or disinformation.
- 20% said they had seen fake or deceptive images or videos.
- 51% of men said they had encountered misinformation, compared with 35% of women.
These figures describe respondents’ reported experiences during a defined four-week period. They do not measure the total volume of false content online or establish that every item identified by a respondent was objectively false.
The audience for misinformation also overlaps with the audience for ordinary news and commentary. That makes the setting important: a misleading claim encountered in a short post, a video, a private message, or a face-to-face conversation may be assessed differently by the person receiving it.
Where deepfakes appear
Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 reported source and format patterns among UK internet users aged 16 and older who had encountered a deepfake. Social media was the most frequently named source, followed by video-sharing platforms and email.
| Deepfake source or format | Share reporting it |
|---|---|
| Social media | 74% |
| Video-sharing platform | 47% |
| 11% | |
| Image | 68% |
| Video | 60% |
| Text | 29% |
The source percentages and format percentages describe different characteristics of reported encounters, so they should not be added together. A single encounter may also involve more than one channel or format.
Age differences were visible in video-sharing exposure. Among 16–24-year-olds who encountered a deepfake, 59% said it came from a video-sharing platform. The corresponding figure for people aged 55 and older was 38%. This does not mean every younger user sees deepfakes, but it shows that the reported source mix differed between these age groups.
Social media’s 74% share is therefore especially important for students and other young adults who use several digital channels during a normal day. The figures do not identify which platform was used, how frequently content was encountered, or whether the content was believed.
What deepfakes depict
Reported deepfake encounters often involved public affairs, entertainment, or fraud. In Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 data, 49% of adults who encountered a deepfake said it related to a politician or political event. Other commonly reported categories included humorous or satirical content and fraudulent advertising:
- 47% said the deepfake was humorous or satirical.
- 45% said it was a fraudulent or scam advertisement.
- 19% of male users said they had seen sexual deepfake content, compared with 8% of female users.
- 53% of male users said they had seen a deepfake about a politician or political event, compared with 44% of female users.
- 50% of male users said they had seen humorous or satirical deepfake content, compared with 42% of female users.
These categories can overlap. For example, a political deepfake may also be presented as satire, and a manipulated image may be distributed as part of a scam advertisement. The reported percentages should be read as descriptions of the encounters respondents recalled, not as a classification of every deepfake circulating online.
The combination of political and commercial content creates practical challenges for campus communities. Students may encounter claims about elections, public figures, scholarships, products, or emergencies in the same feeds. A polished image or video can look more persuasive than a plain text claim even when the underlying evidence is absent.
Election news and the difficulty of judging truth
Pew Research Center’s Americans’ Views of 2024 Election News found that 73% of U.S. adults said they had seen inaccurate news about the 2024 presidential election at least somewhat often. The survey also found that 58% had heard people share inaccurate information about the election in conversation at least somewhat often, including 27% who said this happened extremely or very often.
Respondents were less likely to report frequent inaccuracies from their most-used news sources than from the wider information environment:
- 10% said they saw inaccurate election news from their most-used sources extremely or very often.
- 25% said they saw it from those sources somewhat often.
- 63% said they had not seen inaccurate election news often or at all from their most-used sources.
- 42% of Republicans said they saw inaccurate election news from their most-used sources at least somewhat often.
- 14% of Republicans said they saw it extremely or very often.
The same Pew Research Center report found that 52% of U.S. adults said it was generally difficult to determine whether election news was true, while 47% said it was generally easy. In October 2020, 55% said distinguishing truth from fiction about election news was difficult; in September 2024, the figure was 52%.
Political differences were substantial. Sixty-one percent of Republicans said it was difficult to determine what was true and what was not in election news, compared with 42% of Democrats. Conversely, 58% of Democrats said they found it easy to distinguish truth from fiction in election news. Among Republicans, 51% said they saw inaccurate election news extremely or very often, compared with 24% of Democrats. Thirty-six percent of Democrats said they saw it not too often or not at all, compared with 14% of Republicans.
Within the Republican group, 60% of conservative Republicans said they saw inaccurate election news extremely or very often, compared with 37% of moderate or liberal Republicans. These results describe perceptions and reported exposure; they do not determine which political group encountered more objectively inaccurate material.
Public concern and the role of social media
The UNESCO/IPSOS 2023 survey across 16 countries shows that concern extends beyond individual encounters. Eighty-five percent of citizens said they were worried about the impact of online disinformation. Eighty-seven percent said misinformation had already had a major impact on their country’s political life and could influence election results the following year. Eighty-eight percent called on governments and regulators to address the problem quickly by regulating social media.
Reported exposure was also high: 78% said they often read deliberately falsified information on social media, and 94% said they had been misled or influenced by disinformation at least once before finding out it was false.
Respondents most often identified social media feeds as the place where disinformation and fake news were widespread. The survey recorded these responses:
- 68% named social media feeds.
- 38% named large messaging-app groups.
- 20% named media websites or media mobile apps.
- 19% named television.
- 11% named in-person or online discussions with family, friends, or colleagues.
- 10% named newspapers or news magazines.
- 4% named radio.
The categories are not mutually exclusive. They show where respondents perceived misinformation to be widespread, not a measured share of all false content. For students, the inclusion of messaging groups and personal conversations matters because a claim can move from a public post into a trusted peer network without retaining its original context.
Health misinformation and creator credibility
The World Health Organization has documented high levels of inaccurate or misleading health content in several settings. In the WHO review of reviews published in 2022, health misinformation reached up to 51% of posts associated with vaccines, up to 28.8% of posts associated with COVID-19, and up to 60% of posts related to pandemics. The same review found that 20% to 30% of YouTube videos about emerging infectious diseases contained inaccurate or misleading information.
The figures are upper-bound findings from reviewed studies and topics, not a universal rate for all health posts or all YouTube videos. Separately, in Combatting misinformation online, WHO reported that falsehoods were 70% more likely to get shared than accurate news on some social media platforms. WHO also reported that YouTube removed 850,000 videos related to harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation from February 2020 to January 2021.
Credibility judgments can rely on signals that are not evidence of accuracy. In UNESCO’s Behind the screens survey, 42% of digital content creators said they used the number of likes and shares as their main credibility indicator. Another 21% said they were happy to share content if it had been shared by friends they trusted, while 19% relied on the reputation of the original author or publisher.
The same survey reported that 32.3% of digital content creators had been targeted by hate speech, but only 20.4% reported the case to the platform. This describes creators’ experiences and reporting behavior; it is not a measure of how much hate speech exists across all platforms.
Trust, news fatigue, and cross-country differences
Trust in news varies sharply by country and by channel. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024 recorded that 23% of people in Hungary and Greece said they trusted most news most of the time, the lowest figure in that sample. In Spain, 26% felt worn out by the news agenda in 2019, rising to 44% in 2024. In Argentina, 45% said they avoided the news.
Use of TikTok for news was highest in Thailand in the Reuters Institute sample, where 39% of respondents used it for news, followed by Kenya at 36%. These figures measure reported use, not whether users considered TikTok a reliable source.
Pew Research Center’s Publics in Emerging Economies found that 28% of adults across 11 emerging economies said social media were very important for keeping up with political news and other developments. Yet only 35% trusted political news on social media, including 10% who trusted it a great deal. Across those countries, 55% of social media users trusted information they found on social media at least somewhat, compared with 72% who trusted information from in-person conversations at least somewhat.
Social media can expose users to new ideas as well as false claims. Seventy-five percent of social media users across those countries said they frequently or occasionally saw content that introduced them to a new idea. At the same time, only 8% said they never saw content that appeared obviously false or untrue, and 17% said they never saw content that made them feel negatively toward different groups. Thirty-one percent said social media content was more hateful than content from other sources.
Country-level patterns can differ from the cross-country average. In Lebanon, 83% of people who used multiple social media sites regularly saw articles that seemed obviously false or untrue, compared with 48% of those who used a single site. That comparison describes Lebanese respondents in the cited survey and should not be generalized to every country or every multi-platform user.