Measuring Disinformation: Key Findings from the First Study Under the EU Code of Practice

Did you know about the EU 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation?
Available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation

Well, a study on a “Comparative Analysis of the Prevalence and
sources of Disinformation across Major Social Media Platforms in Poland, Slovakia, and Spain” has been issued (https://disinfocode.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/code-of-practice-on-disinformation-september-22-2023.pdf). This study is the first to test the Code of Practice by measuring how common disinformation is across platforms in Poland, Spain, and Slovakia. It found that when people search for topics related to misinformation on social media, they often encounter a significant amount of misleading content and accounts. This suggests that more needs to be done to reduce the visibility of such content in search results. Additionally, some of this misleading content has high levels of engagement, meaning it’s being widely interacted with. The study sets a baseline for how the Code of Practice is working and how disinformation is spread on social media. Future research can use this approach to track disinformation over time. Other methods, like analysing user feeds and how platforms respond to flagged content, can also be used to build on these findings. The study could be expanded to include more countries and platforms in the future.

What do you think about this?