On both Facebook and Twitter, the Iffy Quotient approximately doubled from January to November 2016.
As the mid-term election approaches, the U-M Center for Social Media Responsibility offers media and the public a tool to help monitor the prevalence of fake news on social media through a Platform Health Metric called the Iffy Quotient. Housed in the U-M School of Information, the center’s first report confirms from a deep analysis what was suspected to be true about the 2016 U.S. presidential election: the Iffy Quotient increased dramatically on both Facebook and Twitter during the election. It also shows that the two platforms have made progress since early 2017 on their promises to crack down on misinformation, but one has succeeded more than the other.
“We at the School of Information are committed to meeting the intellectual and social challenges of this new era of unregulated public communication via social media. At the Center for Social Media Responsibility, we are working directly with social media companies to produce the designs, systems and metrics to steer social media toward more beneficial discourse,” said Thomas Finholt, dean of the School of Information.
