68% of Canadians Reported Encountering COVID-19 #Misinformation on Social Media

TORONTO, May 11, 2020 —  Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, TiKTok and other social media platforms have recently announced that they are stepping up their efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on their platforms but despite these efforts, 68% of Canadians reported encountering COVID-19 misinformation on at least one of the social media sites/apps they use.

This finding comes from a new, census-balanced, survey report “Inoculating against an Infodemic: A Canada-Wide COVID-19 News, Social Media, and Misinformation Survey” by the Social Media Lab at Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University. The survey is released as part of the COVID-19 Misinformation Portal (covid19misinfo.org), a rapid response project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Since the first COVID-19 lockdown order, social media has emerged as an indispensable lifeline for people to connect to friends, families, classmates, and co-workers. This increasing reliance on social media is not without its problems; social media is well-established as a vector in the spread of false narratives. To examine the “digital hygiene” practices of Canadians during this unprecedented health crisis, we asked 1,500 online Canadian adults (18+) about where they get news about COVID-19 from, how often they encounter misinformation on this topic, and what do they do about it.

“One of the primary goals of this Canada-wide survey was to understand what strategies social media users employ when seeing COVID-19 content that they think is false or misleading,” say Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai, co-authors of the report and co-directors of the Ryerson University Social Media Lab.

Other Highlights From the Survey

• Most Canadians say they trust the accuracy of COVID-19 news more from official information sources such as the public service and government ministries & departments than from political parties or even their friends and family.
• More Canadians prefer to get their COVID-19 news from television (60%) than from social media (22%).
• Facebook and Reddit are the two most popular sites for COVID-19 news among their users, but newcomer TikTok also made a surprise showing as a site Canadians are turning to for news about the pandemic.
• COVID-19 misinformation was reported present on all popular social media sites and messaging apps in Canada.
• 68% of Canadians reported encountering COVID-19 misinformation on at least one of the social media sites/apps they use.
• 80% of Facebook users, along with around 70% of Reddit, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube users reported seeing misinformation on these sites “sometimes” or more frequently.
• Among those who reported encountering COVID-19 misinformation on social media sites/apps (1,019 out of 1,500), the majority (76%) indicated they would consult other sources to verify information.
• And while most social media companies rely on their users to flag problems to some extent, surprisingly 56% of respondents in this cohort said they had never reported an account/post that shared misinformation to the social media site.