Who's Responsible for Spreading Disinformation?

According to the 2019 IPR Disinformation in Society Report, 65 percent of Americans consider misinformation a major problem in the United States while 63 percent think that disinformation is a pressing issue. The difference between the two being that disinformation is deliberately misleading while misinformation is the spreading of false information regardless of intent.

So while the majority agrees that the spreading of false information is a problem for the U.S. these days, the question remains who is to blame to the proliferation of what President Trump would call “fake news”.

Interestingly many people think that Trump, a vocal critic of the news media himself, is at least partly to blame for the problem, with 40 percent of the respondents saying he’s very responsible for the spreading of disinformation. As the following chart shows, that ranks him third behind fake social media accounts and politicians in general in the list of those deemed responsible by the American public.

Unfortunately, the report does not break down the results by partisanship, as things would surely look differently among the president’s supporters.