Are we fighting misinformation the wrong way?

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Every few months, a fresh wave of fake news sweeps through our Facebook feeds, and the familiar chorus begins: fact-checkers mobilize, media literacy campaigns refresh their decks, and editors write stern pieces about gullibility. The Philippines has been fighting this fight for years. We are not winning and the problem may not be the enemy but the strategy.

A 2026 study published in New Media & Society by University of Zurich behavioral scientist Sacha Altay should force a serious reckoning in newsrooms, government communications offices, and civil society organizations across the country. Altay reviewed the growing body of research on misinformation and its interventions, and the conclusion is uncomfortable: almost everything we think we know about the problem is wrong.

Start with the most basic assumption. Misinformation, Altay’s review finds, is not actually everywhere. In Europe and the United States, unreliable news represents between 0.7% and 6% of people’s online news diet. When you account for the fact that most people spend only about 5% of their online time reading news at all, misinformation drops to roughly 0.15% of the average person’s total media diet. The “infodemic” was real in the sense that fear of it was real. The panic, research now shows, was disproportionate to the actual exposure.

The implications for how we fight this fight are enormous, and they apply here with particular urgency.

The Philippines is not a Western democracy. Institutional trust here has been eroded not merely by partisan media but by decades of corruption, extrajudicial violence, and state capture of information ecosystems. When Altay notes that conspiracy ideation is higher in countries with greater corruption and lower press freedom, that is not a mere footnote about somewhere else but a description of our very real condition.

This matters because the most common anti-misinformation tools — fact-checking, nudges to think before sharing, media literacy training — are all built on the assumption that people believe misinformation because they lack critical thinking skills or accurate information. But Altay’s synthesis of the evidence suggests the opposite is often true. People are already skeptical, sometimes pathologically so. They are more likely to reject a true headline as false than to accept a false headline as true. Teaching people to be more skeptical, the research shows, risks making them distrust reliable journalism even faster than they already do.

This is the trap we keep walking into. Every “spot fake news” campaign, every browser warning, every friction-adding prompt before you share an article, suppresses the sharing of reliable information as often as it suppresses misinformation. Since people encounter real news far more often than fake news, the collateral damage to credible journalism is, by definition, greater.

Altay’s most actionable finding is also the most overlooked: consequential misinformation does not come primarily from ordinary Facebook users. It comes from the top. A small number of politicians, influencers, and public figures give misinformation most of its visibility and social legitimacy. Preventing one account with a million followers from spreading a false claim is mathematically equivalent to stopping 5,000 ordinary users with 200 followers each. Yet almost all of our interventions are aimed at ordinary users and the powerful walk free.

There is a credible counter to Altay’s framework. His evidence base is largely drawn from North American and European studies. Misinformation may genuinely be more prevalent in Global South contexts, and in countries where high-quality journalism is scarce or suppressed, the prescription to simply “trust reliable sources” collapses if those sources barely exist or are state-controlled. Altay acknowledges this, and it is worth taking seriously. The solution cannot be identical across wildly different media ecosystems.

But that caveat actually strengthens the case for a structural rethink here. If the standard toolkit works poorly under ideal conditions in Western democracies, it will work even more poorly in a country where institutional distrust is rational, press freedom rankings are falling, and the business model of independent regional journalism is in chronic crisis.

The harder and more important work is not teaching readers to spot fake news. It is rebuilding the conditions under which reliable journalism is produced, trusted, and sought out. That means defending independent media from legal and economic pressure, holding political super-spreaders of misinformation publicly accountable, and asking why so many people have decided that established institutions are not worth trusting. That last question is not a media literacy problem but a governance problem.

Fact-checking has its place. So does media literacy. But neither is sufficient, and neither addresses the demand for misinformation that drives its persistence. As long as political polarization, institutional dysfunction, and economic insecurity give people reasons to distrust everything except the voices that validate their grievances, debunking individual false claims is the equivalent of bailing out a flooding boat with a teaspoon.

The newsrooms, civil society groups, and government agencies spending resources on the standard toolkit should ask whether they are solving the problem or managing the symptoms while the disease advances.

The answer, increasingly, is clear.