News Editor Holly Briggs analyses how misinformation spreads on social media and why algorithm driven platforms are putting young people at particular risk of exposure to false information.
Hours after the fatal attack on a dance class in Southport in 2024 posts began to spread on X containing misinformation fuelling race related riots across the country.
Despite an official police statement confirming the suspect had been born in Cardiff, an account on X called ‘Europe Invasion’ claimed instead that he was ‘a Muslim immigrant’. The post was seen by close to 4 million users.
Further posts emerged inventing a false name for the suspect and claiming that he was an asylum seeker who had arrived by boat to the UK the previous year.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. It is a symptom of how people now consume news. As the public shift to getting their information from social media, false claims spread further than corrections ever will.
Even X’s own owner, Elon Musk, has contributed to this problem.
He reposted a fake headline styled to look like The Telegraph, claiming Kier Starmer was considering building detainment camps on the Falkland Islands to free up prison space. The post originated rom the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First. Musk deleted it after around 30 minutes, yet by then, it had already been viewed nearly 2 million times.
Why this matters
The proportion of UK adults who get their news from social media is not small; thus, a large proportion are exposed to this misinformation.
Misinformation has the negative effect it does because of how many people are getting their news this way.
A recent Ofcom report on UK news consumption habits found that despite a fall in the interest of news there is still a demand to keep up with it, with almost 96% of UK adults consuming news in some form.
Social media is now used by 51% of UK adults to get their news, with Facebook remaining the most popular social media platform, used by 30% of people they spoke to.
For young people online platforms are being used far more than traditional platforms, with eight in ten 16-24 year olds using online platforms to get their news. 3/4s of the young people Ofcom spoke to used social media as the main way to access news.
Most strikingly, X is the leading platform for 12 to 15-year-olds for weightier news topics, such as politics and current affairs. This is a troubling statistic given how much false information is circulated on the platform.
The gravity of the misinformation
The Social Market Foundation (SMF), supported by the BBC, analysed over 125,000 social media posts across local Facebook groups, X searches and Nextdoor communities.
They found that 2 in 5 local Facebook groups and over four-fifths of X searches featured at least one piece of misinformation in the last 1,000 posts.
Focusing on news related content specificially, nearly 1 in 26 (4%) on Facebook, and over 1 in 4 (28%) on X, were misinformation.
This pattern is present locally as well. Analysis of four Facebook groups in Gorton and Denton during the recent by-election found that 7.3% of news-related posts were misinformation.
Looking more broadly at locations in the UK that held local elections in May, news related misinformation posts rose from 8.2% to 12.9% in the weeks before polling day (56% increase).
Misinformation is not just limited to text, it comes in many forms, with AI doctoring becoming increasingly a worry. Wakefield councillor Armaan Khan and ward colleagues were digitally edited into a photo standing next to a housing estate they had actually opposed. The original image showed the group next to open fields.
The wider risk
When thinking of the broader rise in populism, not only in the UK, the stakes of misinformation are only rising.
The fact that 12- to 15-year-olds are turning to X as a news source raises genuine concerns about the quality and accuracy of what they are absorbing.
Part of the issue is structural, the X algorithm is designed to recommend content based on prior engagement.
Their help centre states:
“The choices you make when using X, such as the accounts and topics you follow and the lists you create or join, help determine the content you see”.
In principle this sounds fine, until you factor in that more than 1 in 4 news related posts on X contain misinformation. It becomes easy therefore, especially for younger users, to be exposed to a large amount of false content.
Against a backdrop of a rise in right wing populism and increasingly racist and xenophobic rhetoric in political spheres, exposing young people to this misinformation is only reinforcing those ideologies.
The risk compounds when the source is someone widely trusted. People are more likely to believe and share information that aligns with what they already believe, especially if it is being reshared by a recognisable figure like Musk.
Platforms like X and Facebook aren’t solely to blame, the deeper failure here may lie within our education system that isn’t teaching children how to fact check what they read. However, that is not an immediate fix. These platforms cannot rely on readers catching misinformation that they don’t know how to spot. Moderation has to move faster than a repost, safe guards must be put in place, specifically in a world of increasing polarisation.
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