correction
An earlier version of this story mischaracterized as a non-profit one of the organizations whose work the NYU study relied on. NewsGuard is a for-profit company that helps advertisers avoid having their advertisements appear on misinformation and hoax sites. This version has been corrected.
A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources.
The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources, such as CNN or the World Health Organization.
