People are really bad at identifying online misinformation

In an experiment asking people whether a news item was accurate or intentionally misleading, 77% of participants would have been better off flipping a coin to identify the disinformation. Six percent of the participants were as good as a coin-flip. Just 17% of people were more accurate than random guessing. Nobody did very well, though: The very best person was accurate about two-thirds of the time.

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: Moravec et al., 2018. Get the data