A new report has highlighted the growing dangers of misinformation on local Facebook groups in the absence of traditional local media.
Researchers from the think tank, the Social Media Foundation (SMF), found that misinformation flourished (nearly three times as likely) in geographic areas with no recognised local media, in contrast to areas with strong local media, which had fewer cases of misinformation in the study.
Across the study, involving over 125,000 social media posts across the platforms X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Nextdoor, “immigration and Islamophobia” proved the most “common” forms of misinformation on X and Facebook (32 per cent), respectively.
The researchers noted that, beyond misinformation about immigration or Islamophobic sentiments, the next biggest topic on X for misinformation related to health (13 per cent), with totalising, criminalising narratives that grouped migrants and asylum seekers as threats to women and children.
Just over one-fifth of flagged content (23 per cent) of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim content flagged on Facebook (and just over one-third on X), pushed conspiracies of so-called demographic ‘replacement’, linked Muslims and migrants broadly to criminality, and pushed ideas of ‘double standards’ in the justice system, which they added, included the dangerous role of AI-generated content (with some audiences unaware that it was fake). One noteworthy meme in the report showed how anti-Muslim and Islamophobic conspiracies included racialised tropes placing Muslims as a menacing foreign ‘threat’ (often as refugees) who would seek to violently take over.
Beyond financial scams in local Facebook groups, the report explored the sheer prevalence of ‘anti-vax’ conspiracies on X. The overarching commonality across the social media platforms stemmed from misinformation content that came from other content creators, not a direct creation of the user, the report noted, drawing upon examples found on X, where “posts flagged as fake news in this project was reshared from elsewhere, such as videos from Instagram or X influencers.” Regarding anti-migrant misinformation on Facebook, the authors added that far-right groups had reshared it on the platform.
Tell MAMA has published various research and news articles about the threat of racialised and criminalising misinformation and disinformation about Muslim communities on social media, and how AI-generated content is fuelling it further.
Last year, in our wide-ranging annual report, we warned how “examples flagged with Tell MAMA make full use of the technology to push racialised, stigmatising, and criminalising tropes about Muslims – externalising Muslim men and women as distinct cultural, demographic threats to mythologised, monocultural themes of national identity.”
Our research also highlighted the ongoing threat of far-right extremism and terrorism permeating platforms like Telegram to pro-terror content on TikTok glorifying the Christchurch terrorist.
Similar to the findings in the SMF report, Tell MAMA found that dehumanising, racialised and violent AI-generated content towards migrants, refugees, and Muslim political figures (and ordinary Muslims more broadly), cross-pollinated from TikTok to Facebook, more so on self-styled “comedy” pages that celebrated AI-generated forms of murder towards migrants and refugees.
We continue to urge the government to develop strategies for combatting disinformation and misinformation online and publish guides on improving social media literacy skills that serve communities of all ages and backgrounds.