No news is bad news: The hidden threat of unchecked local misinformation

The Social Market Foundation analyzed more than 125,000 posts from local Facebook groups, X searches, and Nextdoor locations in Britain. It found misinformation in two of five Facebook groups and more than four-fifths of X searches studied; among news-related posts, about 4 percent on Facebook and 28 percent on X were classified as misinformation.

Places with no or limited local news outlets had nearly three times the average misinformation share in the Facebook sample, while local-news oases had roughly half the average. The report is candid that those place comparisons rest on small samples—12 news-desert groups and 13 news-oasis groups—and therefore point to an institutional relationship rather than proving causation.