The Maldita.es Foundation and Factchequeado, with support from Tech Policy Press, have published an investigation to measure the response rates by Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube to misinformation about the US presidential election of November 5, 2024.
We have analyzed a sample of 510 publications in Spanish and English related to the elections and of particular relevance to Latino communities. All of them had already been publicly debunked by 9 US-based fact-checking organizations that are verified signatories of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and that work in Spanish.
The main results are the following:
In total, 55% of posts containing misinformation received no visible action from platforms, with significant differences among the different platforms.
YouTube and X are the platforms that fared worst against misinformation: 81% of the misinformative content received no action on YouTube and 75% on X.
TikTok shows a somewhat lower percentage of inaction (68%), but It is the platform that most frequently used content removal (78% of its actions), a practice discouraged by fact-checking experts.
The percentage of actions on misinformative content on Meta platforms shows significant differences with a similar study carried out during the European Parliament elections. In Europe only 11% of debunked content on Facebook received no visible action, compared to 25% in the US. On Instagram, the figure was 29%, compared to 40% in the American elections.
Of the 20 most viral posts that did not receive any action from the platforms, 19 of them were on X and accumulated more than 6.5 million views each.
Misinformation content in Spanish and English received a similar percentage of response. The greatest differences appear on Facebook, where disinformation content in Spanish received a greater response (79.7% vs. 45.8%), and on X, with greater action visible in publications in English (28.3% vs. 15.2%).
Misinformation about candidates was the most prominent among posts strictly related to “Elections”, the most analyzed topic, while “Migration” was the second most popular topic, representing almost 20% of the misinformation in the sample.
You can access the full report in English here.