Average Monthly Reach of Prominent French News Sites and Some of The Most Popular False News Sites (2017)
Source: Fletcher, Richard, Alessio Cornia, Lucas Graves and Rasmus Kleis. "Measuring the Reach of “Fake News” and Online Disinformation in Europe," Reuters Institute, February 2018
Topic: Disinformation
Reference year: 2017
Geographical area: France
Method: Data collection
Link to original document:
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
The graph shows that all of the false news sites in the French sample have a comparatively small reach. On average, most reached just 1% or fewer of the French online population each month in 2017. The most popular, Santé+ Magazine—an outlet that has been shown by Les Décodeurs to publish demonstrably false health information—reached 3.1% (this equates to around 1.5 million people). This was more than double that of well-known Russian outlets like Russia Today (1.5%) and Sputnik News (1.4%), which despite their international prominence, are used only by a small minority.