Fake news and misinformation: how to measure their real weight in public opinion

Every week some hoax circulates about a public body, a policy or a candidate. The usual reaction is to respond quickly. Sometimes that is right. Other times, responding to something that barely moved gives it the visibility it never had.

The difference is measurement. Not whether there is fake news, because there almost always is, but how much it weighs in public opinion.

Misinformation, hoaxes and opinion are not the same

It helps to separate three things:

• Misinformation: false or misleading content that circulates, with or without intent.
• A hoax, or fake news: one specific piece of misinformation, usually in a recognisable format. A video taken out of context, a doctored screenshot, an invented figure.
• Opinion: a judgement, however harsh or uncomfortable. It is not misinformation.

Mixing them up leads to mistakes in both directions: treating legitimate criticism as a hoax, or letting a hoax through because it looks like one more opinion. That is why, in a public opinion study, what counts as misinformation is agreed before the work starts.

Five questions to measure its weight

1. How far has it circulated? Volume is the starting point, not the conclusion.
2. Where has it circulated? A closed group of like-minded accounts is not the same as the general conversation. We have written about why detecting bots does not prove they had influence.
3. Has it left its bubble? The key moment is when a hoax reaches people who were not looking for it.
4. Has the conversation changed? If new topics, new words or a different tone appear in the comments after the hoax, it had an effect. If not, it was noise.
5. Which format carried it? More and more, misinformation travels as video. A short video with a clear emotion spreads differently from text. Some studies suggest that falsehood moves faster than truth on some networks.

What to do with the answer

• If the hoax has not left its bubble, responding can amplify it. Often, monitoring it is enough.
• If the conversation has changed, a response is needed, and the conversation itself shows which format and tone to use.
• If it is part of a longer narrative, debunking piece by piece is less useful than understanding the story that ties the pieces together.

Public bodies and political parties

For a public body, misinformation affects trust in a service or a policy. For a political party, especially during an election campaign, it affects how a candidate or a proposal is perceived. The method is the same: public data, agreed criteria and a documented reading with its pieces and its limits.

At Trendia we do not rule on what is true. We identify the pieces that shift the narrative, document how they circulate and measure whether they moved public opinion. Here is how we do it for public bodies, institutions and political parties.