THE YEAR IN MISINFORMATION
he year began with misinformation about the impeachment of President Trump from one side of the aisle—and a flurry of Democrat-funded websites posing as local news sites from the other. Soon, the internet and social media feeds were rife with myths about the origins of COVID-19, false proposed cures and misinformation about a vaccine. More recently, falsehoods about the 2020 election and the vote-counting process proliferated. ¶ With 2020 drawing to a close, NewsGuard has compiled Top 10 lists highlighting some of the most influential U.S.-based peddlers of online misinformation identified by NewsGuard’s analysts. ¶ Take, for example, , a site that has been publishing misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine since was one of the most-shared misinformation sites in 2020. ¶ True Pundit received a score of 0 in News-Guard’s Nutrition Label, meaning it passes none of NewsGuard’s nine credibility and transparency criteria. Nevertheless, the site garnered more than 5 million “engagements” (or likes, shares and comments on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) in 2020, according to NewsWhip, a social media analytics company. That is roughly the same amount of engagement earned by STAT News, a respected health and science news website that has been a leader in covering the pandemic and earned a perfect 100 score from NewsGuard. ¶ NewsGuard’s year-end lists also spotlight U.S.-based publications, big and small, that are practicing responsible journalism in a transparent manner. ¶ To produce these lists, NewsGuard relied on our credibility ratings of nearly 5,000 news and information sites in the U.S., and engagement data NewsGuard obtained from NewsWhip.
