One Third of Americans Believe Russian Disinformation, NewsGuard-YouGov Survey Find
NewsGuard
In the ongoing battle between fiction and reality, fiction — much of it created by Russia’s robust disinformation machine — appears to be winning.
A national YouGov survey commissioned by NewsGuard found that one third of Americans believe at least one false claim being spread by Russian media outlets.
The survey, conducted on a representative sample of 1,000 Americans, presented respondents with 10 false claims that have spread widely online, including three that originated from or were primarily spread by Russian media outlets. Respondents were asked to identify whether each claim was true, false, or whether they were unsure about its veracity.
The false claims were selected from NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints, a continuously updated data stream of provably false claims spreading online.
The survey found that Americans believe Kremlin disinformation at an alarming rate and are unable to consistently identify Russian disinformation claims as false.
The results also show that Americans are widely vulnerable to believing falsehoods spread online across a range of topics including health and medicine, elections, and international conflicts: Of the 10 claims presented, 78 percent of respondents believed at least one claim, and less than 1 percent of respondents correctly identified all 10 claims as false.
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