07/01/2025
NewsGuard Launches ‘Reality Gap Index’ to Track How False Claims Are Penetrating Through to the American Mainstream
First Month’s Finding: 49% of Americans Believed June’s Top False Claims
(July 1, 2025 — New York, NY) NewsGuard today announced the launch of the Reality Gap Index, the nation’s first ongoing measurement of Americans’ propensity to believe the top false claims circulating online each month.
In a monthly survey of a representative sample of Americans conducted by YouGov, the Reality Gap Index measures the percentage of Americans who believe at least one of the month’s top false claims. For June, the percentage was 49 percent.
“Every day our team tracks and debunks the potentially harmful false claims that malign actors — from Moscow to Beijing to those peddling health-care 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 the false claims? That’s the goal of the Reality Gap Index.”
False claims are sourced from NewsGuard’s False Claim Fingerprints data stream, which tracks provably false information with significant spread online. Respondents are quizzed on the top three claims circulating each month, determined by an assessment of each claim’s virality, spread, impact, and potential for harm.
The measure is the first of its kind aiming to quantify over time the effectiveness of this continuing assault on reality. Beginning this month, the Reality Gap Index will track the percentage of Americans who believe that one of three top false claims is true. These reports will provide insights into how hoaxes — including from AI-generated fake audio, images, and videos — and malign information operations from Russia, China, and Iran succeed in misleading the American public. This analysis will also report on the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of countermeasures like fact checks or guardrails from generative AI, social media, or other platforms to disclose to Americans when they are presented with false claims.
The June 2025 Reality Gap Index: 49% of Americans Believe One of the Month’s Top False Claims
To conduct the survey, NewsGuard and YouGov presented a nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans with three false claims that had gained wide traction online. Participants were asked whether they believed each claim to be true, false, or if they were unsure.
These false claims were drawn from NewsGuard’s False Claim Fingerprints, a continuously updated feed of provably false narratives gaining traction online. The selection focused on high-impact hoaxes — those with broad reach and significant potential for harm. These false claims were:
Claim: Pallets of bricks were planted in Los Angeles during June 2025 anti-deportation protests as part of a plan to arm protesters with bricks.
Claim: U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal spent a total over $800,000 of taxpayer money on hotels during a trip to Ukraine.
Claim: White South Africans are being systematically killed as part of a “white genocide.”
Click here for debunks of each claim and the detailed survey results.
The findings were striking: Nearly half of Americans (49 percent) affirmatively believed at least one of the three false claims to be true; only 7 percent of respondents could correctly identify all three claims as false; and 74 percent of those surveyed responded that they were unsure about the truth or falsehood of at least one claim.
The Reality Gap Index will be published each month — with a graph tracking the prior months’ scores — in NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter, which reports each week on false information, how it spreads, and who’s behind it.
Methodology
NewsGuard commissioned a June 2025 study with YouGov that polled a nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans ages 18+. The survey was carried out online and prompted respondents with three statements conveying false claims spreading online. Respondents were asked to reply to each claim with a response of “True,” “False,” or “Not Sure.”
After completing the survey, respondents were presented with accurate information debunking each claim to ensure that the survey did not inadvertently advance false information.