Hot report summer + News/analysis

The Spectrum of Misinformation returns for 2026 with more news, analysis & practical advice for communicators.

In News digest: diarrhoea mythbusting, Insta AI backlash, World Cup deepfakes, Glasgow disorder, cool scammings, South Korea false info law, solar flare conspiracies, chatbot belief boost, Nandy's X-it, Ebola misinfo attacks. Plus: US climate scientists fight back, fake cancer cures, and 'manosphere' mayhem. Feeling the heat? Check out our Summer report sizzlers, then ponder if Meta has A Wynning Strategy.

News digest

Forbes debunks false claims around a cyclosporiasis outbreak in the US with thousands of people falling ill due to consuming food contaminated with a parasite that can cause explosive diarrhoea. Myths include that it spreads from person-to-person and that all lettuce is infected.

BBC reports Meta pulled Muse Image, a GenAI tool used to make fake images from user content on Instagram, after a public backlash.

France24 highlights misinformation circulating around the World Cup including GenAI deepfakes of managers making racist remarks and fake news that German fans want to ban African and Muslim players.

Scottish police have told people to factcheck online claims before going to protests, The Guardian reports, after false information about men accused of sex crimes in Glasgow led to several nights of disorder.

Have you seen this fake air cooling device? Lots of people have with adverts on social media making misleading claims and featuring bogus customer reviews. Far from being advanced tech experts say it's "a load of cardboard fins that get wet as the water blows past them".

Euronews covers South Korea enforcing a law targeting false information posted online despite concerns it could erode free speech. Journalists have called for safeguards to ensure reporting and news-gathering are not suppressed.

AFP debunks conspiracy theories claiming that solar flares or energy weapons caused the recent heatwaves with human-induced climate change really to blame.

The Guardian highlights a US survey which found users of AI tools and chatbots are more likely to believe false claims such as vaccines cause autism or that measles vaccine is more dangerous than the virus.

Reuters reports Lisa Nandy saying DCMS will leave X as the platform "now favours abuse and misinformation ​over meaningful debate".

NPR explores how former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, laid off as part of DOGE cuts, have set up Climate.us, a website to give people trustworthy climate information.

BBC covers a series of violent attacks during the Ebola outbreak in DRC linked to misinformation with Africa CDC's Dr Wessam Mankoula saying: "Ebola misinformation is Ebola's greatest ally."

The Guardian highlights a poll which found 2 out of 5 frontline health workers say they encounter patients who raise inaccurate or misleading information about dietary supplements at least once a week. WRCF Director Steven Greenberg warns: "social media is flooded with false promises and dangerous claims about cancer prevention and cures".

In a Huffington Post comment piece a doctor at Numan argues more action is needed to tackle 'manosphere' influencers promoting drugs, such as steroids and weight-loss jabs, to vulnerable young men.

Summer report sizzlers

This summer has seen a series of blockbuster reports into some of misinformation's hottest topics, I've read them so you don't have to...

Wellcome: Trust issues

Wellcome has released a trilogy of reports by RAND Europe investigating public trust in science, with the landscape review giving the most helpful insights into the links between trust and misinformation.

While the findings suggest trust in science is 'generally moderate to high... even small numbers of people who do not trust it may have a disproportionate impact on policy and the spread of misinformation'.

The report looks at factors linked to trust in the process of science, in scientists as individuals, and in scientific institutions. It also looks to tease out the differences between a lack of trust and (epistemic) distrust: 'Even though distrust might be justified in some cases, misinformation and disinformation can boost an undesired distrust in science.'

An accompanying social media analysis outlines how discussions of new topics rarely begin with a blank slate, with prior exposure to misleading narratives and 'the influence of wider misinformation ecosystems, including selective framings, conspiratorial insinuation and narratives of institutional manipulation' affecting how audiences respond.

The report highlights the need for accessible, trusted tools and sources of information, media literacy in education, and interventions that help individuals develop the skills to evaluate claims.

A Nature long-read on research into trust in science gives helpful context: while, at a global level, trust in science and scientists remains high this trust is uneven, varying between countries and political groups.

Trust was 'relatively high in some African countries, including Nigeria and Kenya' and low in Russia and some ex-USSR countries while 'The United States ranked in the top third, and China near the middle'.

The piece cites previous Wellcome polling in Britain that found: '84% of respondents said they had at least some trust in science. But the proportion who trusted science “a lot” dropped from 63% in 2020 to 34%'. The US has seen a similar decline but also a political split with Republican-sympathisers who have confidence in scientists falling from 85% in 2020 to 65% in 2025.

Gordon Gauchat suggests some US politicians 'helped to power the populist view that scientists, other academics and their institutions are part of an intellectual elite, “making them the villains”, who do not represent the views of ordinary citizens'. It's hard not to conclude that, by employing the classic tactics of discrediting and scapegoating, they made the US ripe for populist politicians and their misinformer allies to spread and profit from misinformation.

UN: threat from AI

A new United Nations report assesses the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI, including its impacts on the information ecosystem.

It starts out by referencing: 'Between 15% and 40% of claims from optimized models were rated as likely to be misinformation, yet false claims proved as persuasive as true ones.'

The report, reflecting the views of an independent scientific panel, warns: 'Looking ahead, the gap between rapidly improving capabilities and effective risk management methods may lead to catastrophic outcomes.'

It points to how 'advanced technical abilities may allow novice private actors to use AI in malicious ways' including to power disinformation, adding: 'The scale of AI facilitated disinformation is undermining a trustworthy information ecosystem.'

It highlights three key challenges: 'epistemic erosion', a weakening of people's ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, 'the liar’s dividend', where a bad actor can dismiss truths as misinformation, and 'synthetic consensus', GenAI simulating public agreement where none exists.

Not only is AI making to harder to tell genuine from generated news, but 'AI-mediated news... may also affect the financial sustainability of journalism and other institutions that support information integrity.'

Worryingly, it found that 'national strategies to address disinformation and persuasion are an exception' and recommends that: 'Governance should not only target content moderation but aim to address the economic, technical and cognitive infrastructure that makes disinformation profitable and persuasive.'

Lords of evidence

The UK House of Lords heard from a range of experts on misinformation and childhood vaccinations with the written evidence just published.

The authors give examples of the impacts of misinformation on vaccines including 'misinformation campaigns around the HPV vaccine... caused vaccination coverage to drop from 70% to 1% in Japan and from 87% to 50% in Ireland', with Japan dropping recommendation of the vaccine likely to have led to 24-27,000 cases of cervical cancer and around 5,000 preventable deaths.

The evidence suggests that anti-vaccine views will come to dominate online as they merge with other forms of pseudoscience and appeal to undecided users. But more influential is news media reporting that conflates causation and correlation in deaths following vaccination.

A Dutch study found that 'misinformation susceptibility and trust in vaccination are two important but independent factors that predict vaccine hesitancy' but there are many gaps in the evidence, including a 'lack of real-world population-level health campaign trials'. 

The authors say regulators need to provide guidelines to broadcasters, force social media firms to make algorithms transparent and give researchers access to data.

'Research has identified a clear causal role of misinformation in reducing vaccine uptake...' the authors conclude: 'Much more investment is needed in setting up public health infrastructure to monitor and counter misinformation in real-time, including randomized trials that evaluate evidence-based approaches... to counter vaccine misinformation and cultivate vaccine confidence.'

With the UK undergoing a policy reset with a new Prime Minister these reports make useful summer reading for policy-makers and funders.

Meta: A Wynning strategy?

Meta's vendetta against tell-all Facebook memoir Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams has led to some bizarre moments.

Not least was this episode of The News Agents podcast where Wynn-Williams had to leave the studio to allow a discussion of her book, due to the threat of legal action. It was mentioned she is not allowed to hold a copy of her book or even pass through an airport where it is on sale.

The weirdest thing? It remains on sale. You can buy it! I did and then reviewed it last year marvelling at details of how Facebook staff were embedded in Trump's 2016 campaign for months busy 'targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages'. And then there were the jaw-dropping examples of Facebook's alliances with brutal leaders such as Rodrigo Duterte and Myanmar's military.

As I wrote: 'Careless People is a surprisingly entertaining read and positively zips along. No doubt to begin with Facebook was a wild ride, was fun, but like so much of social media, looking back, it's now impossible to ignore how its trajectory dragged us into the darkest corners of the Internet.'

Last things

Traumatised by facts always being under attack? Catch-up with my last newsletter where I say Welcome to the Information Emergency, pal.