Content & Media
Fake News Statistics - How Many Stories Are Shared Per Day?
False news spreads faster than true news. A 2018 study tracked 126,000 verified stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 and found false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted and reached 1,500 people about six times faster. Humans drove most of the spread, not bots. With 7.5 billion social posts per day and 30 to 50% of viral political content containing misinformation, the model puts the daily total of false or misleading items in the billions, though no peer-reviewed study has ever measured the exact share.
Roughly 35K posts every second.
Source: DataReportal 2024; Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, Science 2018.
Last checked: 18 October 2026
What constant exposure to misinformation does to the way you think
AnythingCounter estimates about 375 million misinformation shares per day across social media platforms. You encounter some of them multiple times daily, even if you follow only reliable accounts, because false content spreads through people you trust before it reaches you.
Cognitive research has identified the illusory truth effect: repeated exposure to a claim makes it feel truer, even when you know it is false. You do not have to believe misinformation for it to work. Fact- checkers call the cumulative result "truth decay."
Reading a correction of a false claim still raises the chance you will remember the false version later. Researchers at Cambridge's Social Decision-Making Lab found that the most effective strategy is "inoculation": learning how misinformation works before you encounter it, not after. Corrections, on their own, do not reliably undo the damage.
The MIT study: 6× faster, 10× further, more novel, more emotional
False news spreads 70% more likely to be retweeted than true news and reaches audiences 6× faster (MIT/Science 2018)
MIT / ScienceHumans, not bots, are the primary drivers of fake news spread (MIT/Science 2018)
MIT / ScienceFalse political news diffuses farther, faster, and more broadly than any other category of misinformation
MIT / ScienceMIT analysed 126,000 news stories shared by 3 million people over 4.5 million tweets (2006-2017)
MIT / ScienceFalse news was perceived as more novel by readers, triggering surprise and fear, emotions that drive sharing
MIT / ScienceMisinformation crises: from 2016 election interference to AI-generated news
- 2016US election: "fake news" enters mainstream discourse; Facebook and Twitter policies scrutinised
- 2018MIT/Science paper establishes empirical evidence that false news spreads 6× faster than true news
- 2020COVID-19 "infodemic": WHO declares misinformation a parallel pandemic; platforms remove millions of posts
- 2022Russia-Ukraine disinformation campaigns demonstrate coordinated AI-assisted fake news at scale
- 2024AI-generated fake news, deepfakes, and synthetic audio deployed in national elections globally
Misinformation volume growth since 2016
The spread of misinformation accelerated dramatically after 2016 with social media's algorithmic amplification, and again after 2022 when AI made producing convincing false content essentially free.
| Year | Rate | Est. per day | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 500M/day | 500M | US election, Brexit drive misinformation surge |
| 2020 | 1.5B/day | 1.5B | Pandemic drives unprecedented misinformation surge |
| 2024 | 3.0B/day | 3.0B | AI generation + 5.1B social media users |
Our conservative projection into the future
Volume has roughly doubled every four years since 2016. Every intervention attempted at scale, technical or regulatory, has failed to reduce it. The tools to produce convincing false content are now cheaper and more accessible than at any prior point. If those conditions persist, the trajectory points upward. Researchers in the field disagree on the magnitude, not the direction.
Fake news vs. fake reviews: two parallel deceptions shaping what you believe and what you buy
Both operate by exploiting trust. Fake news corrupts what people believe; fake reviews corrupt what they buy. The two problems share the same underlying mechanism: volume and repetition doing the work that evidence used to do.
Misinformation in the social media age: why false stories win
The physics of misinformation
The MIT 2018 Science study provided the first rigorous empirical evidence for what many had suspected: false information travels farther and faster online than true information. The mechanism is psychological: false news tends to be more novel, surprising, and emotionally provocative than accurate reporting. These qualities trigger sharing behaviour. True news, which tends to confirm existing realities rather than challenge them, generates less emotional arousal and less viral distribution. This creates a structural disadvantage for factual information in the attention economy.
The AI acceleration
Before 2022, creating convincing fake news required either significant effort (fabricating realistic-looking news websites, writing convincing text) or organised state-level resources. Large language models changed this: anyone can now generate convincing disinformation at scale, cheaply, in any language. The 2024 election cycle was the first to be significantly shaped by AI-generated political content. Platforms face an arms race between AI-generated content and AI-powered detection systems, with the offensive side currently ahead.
What peer-reviewed research says about misinformation
| Year | Finding | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | MIT/Science: False news reached 1,500 people 6× faster than true news; humans (not bots) were the main driver. Study: 126,000 stories, 2006-2017 Twitter data. | 70 % more likely retweeted | MIT / Science |
| 2020 | Facebook COVID-19 misinformation: WHO declared "infodemic"; platforms remove millions of posts; misinformation more shareable than official guidance | qualitative pandemic misinformation surge | Statista |
| 2024 | Estimated ~3 billion false/misleading social posts/day; AI-generated fake news increasingly prevalent | 3.0B false/misleading social posts/day | DemandSage |
In perspective
If each of today's estimated 3 billion misleading posts took five seconds to read, the collective time spent would add up to nearly 500 years. That happens every day.
There are enough false posts shared daily to send every person on Earth a misleading headline every three days.
About 2 million misleading posts are shared every minute. Reading them at five seconds each would take one person about four months, day and night.
Frequently asked questions
- How much faster does fake news spread than true news?
- The MIT Science study (2018) found false news reached 1,500 people about six times faster than true news, and was 70% more likely to be retweeted. Political false news showed the strongest effect of any category.
- Do bots drive fake news spread?
- Contrary to the popular assumption, the MIT Science 2018 study found that human users, not bots, were primarily responsible for spreading false news. Bots spread true and false news at roughly equal rates; humans disproportionately amplified false stories because they tended to be more novel and emotionally engaging.
- How is AI changing fake news?
- AI-generated text, images, and video make fake news cheaper and more convincing to produce at scale. In 2024, researchers estimated more than 1,000 AI-powered content farms were operating. Combined with viral social media, they have materially changed the misinformation landscape since 2023.
Cite this rate
AnythingCounter derived rate, last checked October 2026: about 3 billion posts per day.
Method: Based on DemandSage 2024; Statista 2024; MIT / Science 2018, shown as a daily rate.
Suggested citation: AnythingCounter, "Fake news shared," October 2026, https://anythingcounter.com/fake-news-statistics
Primary source: DemandSage; Statista; MIT / Science.
How this number is calculated, and how much to trust it
The live rate is a modelled estimate: 7.5 billion global social media posts/day (DataReportal 2024) × ~40% false or misleading share ≈ 3 billion/day ÷ 86,400 ≈ 34,700/sec. The 40% figure is a high-end assumption from aggregated sources; no peer-reviewed study directly measures the global share of misleading social posts. Conservative academic estimates place the share at 10–15%, which would imply ~750M–1.1B misleading posts/day (~8,700–12,700/sec). The MIT/Science 2018 paper (Vosoughi et al.) establishes that false news spreads faster than true news but does not measure total volume.
The 70% retweeting advantage for false news comes from Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral's 2018 Science paper "The spread of true and false news online," which tracked 126,000 verified stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. With over 10,000 citations, it is among the most-cited social media studies ever published. The 40% misinformation share used for the live rate is a high-end estimate; conservative academic figures put it at 10-15%. AnythingCounter documents this uncertainty rather than hiding it.
Sources: see below. More detail on our methodology page.
Sources
Statista - Misinformation on Social Media - DemandSage - Fake News Statistics 2024 - Science - The Spread of True and False News Online (Vosoughi et al.).
Worth a look... AI-generated news - Deepfakes created - Online speech arrests.