One Third of Americans Believe Russian Disinformation

NewsGuard-YouGov Survey Finds: “In the ongoing battle between fiction and reality, fiction — much of it created by Russia’s robust disinformation machine — appears to be winning. A national YouGov survey commissioned by NewsGuard found that one third of Americans believe at least one false claim being spread by Russian media outlets. The survey, conducted on a representative sample of 1,000 Americans, presented respondents with 10 false claims that have spread widely online, including three that originated from or were primarily spread by Russian media outlets. Respondents were asked to identify whether each claim was true, false, or whether they were unsure about its veracity. The false claims were selected from NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints, a continuously updated data stream of provably false claims spreading online. The survey found that Americans believe Kremlin disinformation at an alarming rate and are unable to consistently identify Russian disinformation claims as false. The results also show that Americans are widely vulnerable to believing falsehoods spread online across a range of topics including health and medicine, elections, and international conflicts: Of the 10 claims presented, 78 percent of respondents believed at least one claim, and less than 1 percent of respondents correctly identified all 10 claims as false. From Russia with Lies: Americans Duped by Kremlin Disinformation – Survey respondents were presented with three false claims that originated or were primarily spread by Russian state media outlets. One third (33.9 percent) believed that at least one of the claims was true. Less than one quarter (23.8 percent) of respondents were able to correctly identify all three Russian disinformation narratives as false. For example, 61 percent of respondents were unable to identify as false the claim that “between 30-50% of U.S. aid money provided to Ukraine has been stolen by Ukrainian officials for personal use.” One in four respondents believed the claim, which originated in an article by the Russian state media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) and was spread by other state-controlled sources, to be true. For NewsGuard’s detailed debunk of this claim, click here…”