Frequency of seeing disinformation in the EU 2022

Almost a third of respondents to a 2022 survey held across the 27 EU member states reported that they came across news which misrepresented reality or was false often or very often, with 28 percent saying that this was the case. Just eight percent disagreed entirely that they regularly saw fake and suspicious content, highlighting the growing problem of misinformation and the dissemination of made-up, manipulated, and doctored news content.

False news sources worldwide

A global study conducted in 2019 revealed that half of the respondents witnessed false news in newspapers and magazines. That year, the results showed that Turkey was the country with the most false news in its print media, with nearly three quarters of respondents encountering fake news in printed publications. In contrast, less than one fifth of the respondents in Japan came across false information in newspapers and magazines.

Media trustworthiness worldwide

The findings to a global survey held between late 2018 and early 2019 showed that the majority of millennials admitted that they trusted the media to some extent to provide reliable and accurate information, while over a quarter said that they had no trust in the media at all for such purpose. As of 2020, traditional media and search engines were the two most trusted sources of news and information in the world. On the other hand, the level of trust in social media decreased between 2012 and 2020, making it the least trusted source of information in the latter year.