More than 80 fact-checking organizations from around the world have urged YouTube to do more to tackle disinformation and not allow its online video platform “to be weaponized by unscrupulous actors”.

Anti-vaccine activists have spent the past few days spreading lies about Betty White, the beloved actress who passed away at 99 years old on Dec. 31. But contrary to internet rumors, Betty White didn’t die after getting a covid-19 booster shot. “Betty died peacefully in her sleep at her home. People are saying her death was related to getting a booster shot three days earlier but that is not true,” White’s agent, Jeff Witjas, told Yahoo Entertainment.

New York would be able to hold social media companies accountable for promoting disinformation, eating disorders and “other unlawful content that could harm others” under a new proposal designed as a workaround to federal law. The new bill – sponsored by state Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan) – comes as lawmakers across the country scramble to address harms attributed to Facebook and Instagram which were exposed in a series of leaks by whistleblower Frances Haugen earlier this year.

At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media, given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines.

In November 2021, a video started circulating on social media that supposedly showed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein issuing a stark warning about the moon crashing into the Earth. This is not a genuine video of Einstein. This video is part of a viral marketing campaign for director Roland Emmerich’s upcoming movie, “Moonfall.”

Facebook is facing mounting pressure from advocacy groups to weed out climate misinformation on its platform and be more transparent about the extent of the false or misleading claims.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told UK lawmakers on Monday she's "shocked" that the company is pouring so much money into the so-called "metaverse." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in July that he wanted Facebook to become a "metaverse company." The word metaverse is borrowed from science-fiction, and refers to a future version of the internet which people access using virtual-reality and augmented-reality headsets, rather than via laptops and phones.

In the first six months of 2021, a group page that spread false and conspiratorial information regarding COVID-19 more than doubled the average number of interactions on Facebook.

As NBC News’ special network-wide series Behind the Wall continues to explore the increasingly complex relationship between the U.S. and China, TODAY senior international correspondent Keir Simmons reports on an investigation into an apparent campaign of disinformation originating in China that’s targeted millions of American online.

Facebook claims it uses artificial intelligence to identify and remove posts containing hate speech and violence, but the technology doesn't really work, according to internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

In Ethiopia, old ethnic tensions are being incited in new ways. And that means the bloody civil war may be entering an even more destructive phase.

The campaigning Philippines journalist Maria Ressa, who was last week awarded the Nobel peace prize, has launched a stinging attack on Facebook, accusing the social media firm of being a threat to democracy that was “biased against facts” and failed to prevent the spread of disinformation.

Frances Haugen says in her time with Facebook she saw, "conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook." Scott Pelley reports.

A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources. The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources, such as CNN or the World Health Organization.

I blew the whistle on inauthentic behavior at Facebook. But authentic misinformation is the bigger problem in the west

Vaccine misinformation hotbed OpenVAERS is one of the leading sources of bad info about COVID vaccines on the internet, and an investigation finds that it’s run by some woman in the Oakland-surrounded suburb of Piedmont with too much time on her hands.

Last week, Facebook disabled our personal accounts, obstructing the research we lead at New York University to study the spread of disinformation on the company’s platform. The move has already compromised our work – forcing us to suspend our investigations into Facebook’s role in amplifying vaccine misinformation, sowing distrust in our elections and fomenting the violent riots at the US Capitol on 6 January.

For example, a Facebook admin of an extremist group could designate someone within that space to be an "expert," whose posts will be amplified.

National outlets amplify clips of angry parents, creating a cycle of outrage

New study shows people who are overconfident in their ability to detect fake news stories are actually the ones most likely to fall for them.