Vincent, E., & Crisan, D. What our second measurement says about misinformation on major platforms in Europe.
Summary
This brief presents the second round of a repeated measurement study assessing the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation on major online platforms operating in Europe. Using an exposure-weighted analysis of posts, the authors track how mis/disinformation exposure has evolved since their first measurement. The headline finding is that TikTok continues to exhibit the highest prevalence of any major platform, with exposure-weighted mis/disinformation rising from roughly 20% to about 25%. Across most platforms, low-credibility accounts continue to enjoy an engagement advantage over high-credibility accounts — a gap that has persisted or widened. The work is explicitly framed as empirical monitoring in service of platform accountability, connected to obligations under the EU Digital Services Act and the Code of Practice on Disinformation.
Key Contributions
- Provides longitudinal evidence on the evolution of mis/disinformation prevalence across major European platforms.
- Documents platform-level differences, singling out TikTok as the worst performer.
- Quantifies the persistent engagement gap favoring low-credibility sources, feeding directly into regulatory and platform-accountability debates.
Methods
- Second-round (repeat) measurement study of mis/disinformation prevalence on major platforms operating in Europe.
- Exposure-weighted analysis of posts to estimate prevalence rather than raw content counts.
- Cross-platform comparison of interaction levels between low-credibility and high-credibility accounts, benchmarked against the first measurement round.
Findings
- TikTok shows the highest mis/disinformation prevalence, at roughly 25% of exposure-weighted posts.
- Prevalence on TikTok rose by about 5 percentage points relative to the first measurement.
- The interaction advantage of low-credibility over high-credibility accounts persisted or worsened on most platforms.
Connections
This measurement-driven accountability work sits alongside other empirical studies of platform information integrity and DSA-era data access, including Rieder2025-ju and Rieder2026-pp on platform data and governance, and shares its concern with quantifying low-credibility content exposure with DeVerna2025-dl and Pierri2025-hm. Its emphasis on exposure-weighting and cross-platform prevalence complements broader debates on how much misinformation people actually encounter, as in Allen2025-ot and Budak-style engagement studies represented here by Bak-Coleman2025-pm.