Explore the Charts

This column chart from the Reuters Institute shows the average monthly Facebook interactions for several prominent French news sites and some of the most popular false French news sites, in million minutes. Notably, although the prominent news sites outperformed the false ones in reach and monthly time spent on their pages, their Facebook interactions lag behind some of the interactions achieved by the false news sites.

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.

In general, the news sites included in the sample outperformed the false news outlets with well over one million interactions per month. In addition, La Repubblica outperformed all of the news sites we considered in the sample. However, eight of the 20 false news outlets in this sample generated more interactions per month than the news website of the Italian public broadcaster, Rainews.

Cumulative data of total time spent with the false news outlet (per month) remains below the time spent with news. Even if people spent just under 50 million minutes per month with Le Huffington Post, this still exceeds the total time spent with all 20 false news sites from the sample.

The best performing outlet was Meteo Giornale—ostensibly a weather site, but also one that has been shown to publish false information about supposedly imminent asteroid strikes and the like. Again, this is roughly half the equivalent figure for Rainews, but very far behind the figures for La Repubblica (443.5 million minutes) and Il Corriere della Sera (296.6 million minutes).

The chart shows that Americans over 65 were more likely to share fake news to their Facebook friends, regardless of their education, ideology, and partisanship. The oldest age group was likely to share nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains on Facebook as those in the youngest age group, or about 2.3 times as many as those in the next-oldest age group. The data regarding the age group 18-29 and 30-44 are not displayed in the source, therefore the value of data in this chart are approximate, determined with pixel count.

The chart shows that that the oldest Americans, especially those over 65, were more likely to share fake news to their Facebook friends. This is true even when holding other characteristics—including education, ideology, and partisanship—constant. The coefficient on “Age over 65” implies that being in the oldest age group was associated with sharing nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains on Facebook as those in the youngest age group, or about 2.3 times as many as those in the next-oldest age group, holding the effect of ideology, education, and the total number of web links shared constant.

The chart shows the level of awareness of Roma communities about a law that forbids discrimination based on skin colour, ethnic origin or religion in nine European Union member states, in 2016. European Union refes to EU28. The United Kingdom left the European Union on 31 January 2020. The results show that, on average, only slightly more than one in three Roma women (34 %) and men (38 %) are aware of the existence of such antidiscrimination legislation in their country.

This chart illustrates the unequal contributions of accounts to a piracy website studied by HADOPI (Haute Autorité Française pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet). Only 14 contributors accounted for 90% of the content uploaded, showing that much of the illegal activity on the site was concentrated in a specific group of users.

This chart shows the number of cases of products detentions at the European Union boders the period 2017-2020, based on the results of the EUIPO report "EU Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: Results at the EU Border and in the EU Internal Market 2020," published in December 2021. The results show that the number of cases has declined in 2020 by almost 25%, reaching a similar level to the one in 2018.