49 Percent of Americans Believe June’s Top False Claims
What happened: NewsGuard today is launching the Reality Gap Index, the nation’s first ongoing measurement of Americans’ propensity to believe the top false claims circulating online each month. For June, NewsGuard found that nearly half (49 percent) of Americans believed at least one of the month’s top three false claims.
“Every day our team tracks and debunks the potentially harmful false claims that malign actors — from Moscow to Beijing to those peddling healthcare hoaxes — are circulating online,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill. “What has not been measured until now is the ultimate result of their work: How successful are they at persuading Americans to believe what’s provably false is true? That’s the goal of the Reality Gap Index.”
A closer look: Through a monthly survey of a representative sample of Americans conducted by polling and market research firm YouGov, the Reality Gap Index measures the percentage of Americans who believe at least one of the month’s top false claims, as reported in Reality Check.
- The claims are sourced from NewsGuard’s False Claims Fingerprints data stream, which tracks provably false information with significant spread online. Respondents are quizzed on what our analysts consider to be the top three claims circulating each month, as determined by an assessment of each claim’s virality, spread, impact, and potential for harm.
June results: Nearly half of Americans (49 percent) reported they believed at least one of the three false claims to be true, while only seven percent of respondents could correctly identify all three claims as false. Seventy-four percent were unsure about the truth or falsehood of at least one claim.
- For example, asked about the claim that Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Richard Blumenthal spent $800,000 in taxpayer money on hotels during a trip to Ukraine, 27 percent of those surveyed said the claim was true and 57 percent were “not sure.” Only 17 percent correctly identified the claim as false.
- Asked about the claim that pallets of bricks were planted in Los Angeles during the June 2025 anti-deportation protests as part of a plan to arm protesters, 24 percent said the claim was true and 43 percent said they were “not sure.” Thirty-three percent correctly classified the claim as false.
- Asked about the claim that white South Africans are being systematically killed as part of a “white genocide,” 26 percent said the claim was true, 33 percent were “not sure,” and 40 percent correctly identified the claim as false.
Read NewsGuard’s first Reality Gap Index report and the press release announcing the new initiative here.
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