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That is understandable. Modernization, cybersecurity, data, automation and infrastructure all require investment. But before leaders assume the answer is more funding, they should ask a harder question: Is the current technology spend optimized well enough?

In many organizations, budget pressure is not caused by one large initiative. It builds slowly through overlapping systems, underused licenses, stale contracts, technical debt and tools that continue to be funded because no one has revisited their value. Each decision may have made sense at the time. Together, they can limit the company’s ability to fund what comes next.

Technology budget optimization is not about cutting for the sake of cutting. It is about making sure every dollar still supports business value, risk reduction, scalability or operational performance. The goal is not to reduce ambition. The goal is to create more capacity for the right investment.

Know what the ecosystem is carrying.

A budget review should not start with a spreadsheet alone. It should start with the technology ecosystem.

Companies need to understand what systems they own, what capabilities those systems provide and where those capabilities overlap. They need to know which platforms are business-critical, underused, no longer meeting expectations or still funded because they are familiar.

An application inventory is helpful, but it is not enough. Leaders need a capability view. Frameworks such as the Technology Business Management have helped companies think more clearly about the relationship between technology cost, business capability and value. The principle matters even if a company does not formally adopt the framework: Technology spend should be connected to what the business is actually trying to achieve.

In technology portfolios I have managed, the hardest part is often separating what is essential from what is simply familiar.

This is where sunk cost thinking becomes dangerous. Companies often continue investing in tools, platforms or custom work because they already spent money, time and political capital to put them in place. Prior investment is not a reason to keep funding something that no longer fits the business or creates more friction than value.

Technical debt adds another layer. Old integrations, manual workarounds, aging platforms and one-off customizations may not appear as obvious budget issues, but they consume time, support capacity and future flexibility.

Contracts and vendors deserve more discipline.

Technology spend also leaks through weak contract management.

Renewal dates get missed. Auto-renewals happen without a usage review. Discounts expire. Vendors expand into overlapping capabilities. Licenses remain active even when adoption is low.

This is not only a procurement issue. It is a leadership issue.

Companies cannot optimize technology spend if they do not have a reliable view of what they own, what they use, what they are obligated to pay for and where contracts no longer match business needs. A contract management system or disciplined renewal process can help, but the tool is less important than the visibility it creates.

Before a renewal, leaders should know whether the platform is still needed, whether usage supports the cost, whether another system already provides the same capability and whether the vendor relationship still delivers the expected value.

The same applies to managed service providers and external partners. Outsourcing can be the right decision for specialized or scalable support needs. But companies still need to know which capabilities must remain internal and where outside support makes more sense. The goal is balance, not dependency.

Optimization should create capacity for change.

The strongest reason to optimize technology spend is not savings. It is capacity.

Every dollar tied up in duplicate tools, unused licenses, weak contracts or avoidable technical debt is a dollar unavailable for higher-value work such as security, data quality, automation, infrastructure resilience, customer experience or business process improvement.

This is why optimization should be connected to reinvestment. If savings disappear into a general cost exercise, teams may view optimization as a cut. If savings help fund modernization, risk reduction or growth, the conversation changes.

Cloud financial management practices such as FinOps have reinforced this broader idea: visibility, accountability and business value matter before spend scales. That same discipline should apply beyond cloud. Technology leaders need to understand where money is going, who is consuming the capability and whether the spend is producing the right outcome.

Technology budgets should make the difference between run, grow and transform more visible. Some spend keeps the business operating. Some reduces risk. Some supports growth. Some enables transformation. Without that view, companies may approve new investments while old decisions continue consuming capacity in the background.

The hard part is that optimization is not just financial. It is also change management.

Teams get attached to tools. Departments build habits around specific platforms. Consolidating, renegotiating or retiring technology can create friction before it creates value.

Budget discipline cannot be treated as a spreadsheet exercise. It requires communication, business sponsorship and a practical transition plan. If a tool is being consolidated, users need to understand the replacement path. If licenses are being reduced, usage data should support the decision. If a legacy system is being addressed, the business needs clarity on why the change matters.

More funding will always be needed for the right priorities. But more funding without optimization can hide poor discipline.

The better question is not only how much more technology investment the business needs. It is whether the current investment is being used well enough to justify the next one.

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It is the war that makes the difference between a benign outlook for inflation and one that puts it back on a rising trajectory, senior UK central bankers believe.

The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee was clear in its decision on Thursday to hold interest rates at 3.75% that underlying pressures on inflation are almost entirely absent in the domestic economy. Prices are stable and, without the war, would be rising steadily at the central bank’s 2% target.

Threadneedle Street officials are worried that retail prices will ratchet up if companies spot a way to increase them, taking advantage of a general expectation among consumers that the war has raised the costs of production. They also fear that workers will see another rise in inflation coming and pitch for a major increase in wages.

They haven’t seen any of these trends yet. If anything, the opposite is true and the spillover, or second-round effects from rising energy and transport costs, remain muted.

Supermarkets have proved resilient and kept food inflation low. Services companies – for so long after the pandemic a source of rising prices – have managed to restrict increases this year.

As the Bank’s quarterly review says: “So far, there are few signs of second-round effects. But there is not enough evidence yet to rule out this risk, and the MPC will continue to monitor evidence closely.”

Annual wage increases are low across the private sector, at 2.8% in the second quarter of this year. They are expected to rise to 3% in the third quarter, but that increase keeps wage increases at a level Bank officials are comfortable with.

As for companies capitalising on a period of rising prices whether or not it actually affects them, the official data does not show that happening across the manufacturing, construction or services industries.

The three MPC members who voted to increase the cost of borrowing this month acknowledge that neither workers nor firms have reacted to inflation. They argue that the figures we have seen – the latest being the drop in the consumer prices index (CPI) to 2.6% in June – are a reflection of cost pressures, or more precisely the lack of them, going into the conflict. Once prices begin to rise again, workers and companies are bound to react, they argue, embedding inflationary pressures into the UK economy even if the Middle East war is settled.

The majority on the MPC focused more on the labour market and a rise in unemployment and sharp fall in vacancies over the last three years. They also see that financial markets have reacted by raising mortgage and commercial lending rates, tightening the screw on homebuyers and firms without the Bank making a move itself.

If anything, businesses that want to invest and with that employ more people could do with a boost from lower interest rates.

It is only Donald Trump’s failure to confect an exit from the Middle East crisis that stands in the way of that.

The Bank’s forecasters expect inflation to peak at 3.2% next spring, but say it could be much higher, at 4.1%, if the war persists and Brent crude prices go back above $100 a barrel and stay there.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said this week that the UK had already lost the equivalent of £28bn in growth this year as a result of the Middle East conflict.

The Bank’s warning that it might need to raise rates if the war continues means the impact on businesses, consumers and mortgage borrowers could, unless Trump pulls back, be much more severe. %!s()

Besigye, who has been in prison since late 2024 on treason charges, is now “unconscious, unable to speak, and unresponsive”, his wife, Winnie Byanyima, said in a post on X on Thursday.

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He has been admitted to the intensive care unit at Mulago National Referral Hospital in the capital, Kampala, added Winnie Byanyima, who also ‌heads the United Nations AIDS programme UNAIDS.

Byanyima has called for her husband to be transferred out of Mulago hospital, a public facility, and into a private facility where he can be treated by his personal physician.

“[Besigye’s] family is saying he needs special treatment and they do not trust the government hospital,” reported Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi from Nairobi in neighbouring Kenya.

“There’s a lot of frustration. The court has not granted that permission for him to be transferred.”

‘Not responding to anything’

Besigye, 70, was seen falling into the dock during his Wednesday courtroom session while protesting against his trial without lawyers of his own choosing, after authorities also detained and charged his main lawyer, Erias Lukwago.

“Before he collapsed, he cried out that he was being injured,” said Byanyima.

Ingrid Turinawe, a close confidant of Besigye, told The Associated Press that she and others were not allowed to see Besigye at Mulago hospital.

“He is in the ICU, and he is not responding to anything,” she said, adding that Besigye’s personal physician was able to see him several hours after he collapsed.

Besigye, a former ally-turned-critic of longtime President Yoweri ‌Museveni, has been in custody since November 2024. He was jailed together with his aide Obeid Lutale in Kenya and ⁠both were repatriated to Uganda where they were subsequently charged with treason.

Besigye’s lawyers, ⁠supporters and rights activists say ⁠that the charges are politically motivated and that his prolonged detention is part of an ongoing crackdown on opponents by ‌Museveni.

Both Museveni and his son, military chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba, have already weighed in against Besigye.

Kainerugaba, alleging that Besigye plotted to kill his father, has previously described the opposition figure as “a dead man walking”. And Museveni himself has said Besigye must answer for “the very serious offences he is alleged to have been planning”.

In recent days, prosecutors have moved to present evidence they say will prove Besigye and others plotted to overthrow the government

Museveni, 81, was declared winner of the last election in January although the results were rejected by ‌runner-up ‌Bobi Wine, who has since gone into exile in the United States. %!s()

A new study published today in Science Advances offers the most rigorous answers yet. It comes from a collaboration between Meta and academic researchers who studied the 2020 U.S. election. It was run from inside the machine—on the live feeds of Facebook and Instagram.

The answers sound reassuring: Exposure to lies was rare for most users, and removing them did not measurably shift anyone's beliefs. But, as a researcher who studies how misinformation permeates these platforms, I think the fine print matters more than the headline.

Harder than it looks

Our political attitudes are shaped by television, talk radio, politicians, family and friends, so isolating social media's contribution is particularly difficult. People also self-select: Those drawn to fringe content surround themselves with others like them in tight clusters, so observation alone can easily miss them and prove little.

The clean way through is a randomized experiment inside the platform, and only the platform can run one. That is what makes this study valuable.

The team of researchers, led by Olivier Bergeron-Boutin from the University of California, Berkeley, first measured how much content—across 231 million adult U.S. Facebook accounts and 200 million Instagram accounts—came from "untrustworthy sources." These included pages, groups, accounts and websites repeatedly caught posting falsehoods by Meta's third-party fact-checkers.

Exposure was rare on average: 1.1% of what the median Facebook user saw and 0.1% of what the median Instagram user saw. But it was strikingly concentrated. For example, some 53 million Facebook accounts—23% of users—received nearly 80% of content from untrustworthy sources.

For the most exposed 2.5%, untrustworthy sources supplied the majority (roughly 60%) of the political and social content they saw from pages and groups.

Tweaking the algorithm

For three months around the 2020 election, posts from these repeat offenders were removed from the feeds of half of nearly 16,000 consenting users. Exposure in the targeted feeds fell by about 70%.

The researchers tracked 10 outcomes on each platform, including belief in false claims, the ability to tell true from false, polarization and trust in media. Nothing moved, not even among the heaviest consumers (though estimates for that group are less precise).

This echoes the findings of similar experiments: changing the feed algorithm, removing reshares, even paying people to log off entirely barely moved attitudes in the short run.

The gray zone

So is the misinformation debate settled? Not quite. The weak points of the study sit at the joints between what was measured and what will likely be claimed on its behalf.

A source counted as "untrustworthy" only after Meta's fact-checking partners caught it twice. Those partners published roughly 300 U.S. fact-checks in January 2020; matching software then spread such verdicts across far more content, about 180 million labeled pieces during 2020.

But anything the pipeline didn't catch counted as trustworthy. "Exposure was rare" really means "exposure to detected repeat offenders was rare."

The gray zone stays invisible by design.

In the one domain where it has been quantified—COVID vaccine content—misleading material that was never flagged had an estimated 46 times the total impact of everything the fact-checkers caught.

And in the case of state-backed influence operations that weaponize information, accounts are rotated and stay below exactly these detection thresholds.

Not normal Facebook

The control group was not experiencing everyday Facebook.

Around early November 2020, Meta deployed 63 emergency election measures aimed at reducing the flow of falsehoods for all users. One reanalysis of a companion study estimates these cut the share of untrustworthy content in ordinary feeds by around 24%. The experiment measured extra cleaning on top of an already scrubbed platform.

The dose was modest too: About three of 250 daily posts a Facebook user viewed were removed (12 of roughly 1,050 on Instagram) for three months. This is compared with attitudes developed over decades and anchored in identity and community.

And, crucially, participants had to volunteer for a study. People who agree to participate in such experiments are not always representative of the population at large.

Twelve of the 30 authors are current or former Meta employees, and every measurement instrument is in Meta's proprietary pipeline. The lead academics took no money from Meta and had final say over the text, but the project's own independent evaluator previously called the arrangement "independence by permission" and warned it should not become the model.

Remembering what was actually measured

Since 2020, much has changed on social media—especially when it comes to how Meta manages misinformation and disinformation.

The company ended third-party fact-checking in the United States in April 2025. By the study authors' own admission, the intervention they tested "is no longer possible" there, and exposure to falsehoods "could increase considerably."

Its replacement, Community Notes, cuts resharing when notes appear but typically arrives after posts have gone viral. Even Meta's own Oversight Board judged it inadequate as a substitute in March 2026.

There is a risk this study will be leveraged by big tech platforms to exonerate themselves—for example, by saying "users are rarely exposed to" falsehoods. It may also motivate them to stop moderation efforts on the basis that "removing misinformation changes nothing."

But remember what was actually measured: detected sources, a scrubbed baseline, a small dose, a short window, and people willing to be watched.

The study is good science. But some conclusions drawn from it might not be.

Publication details

Olivier Bergeron-Boutin et al, Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adz6502

Who's behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile →

Andrew Zinin

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Citation: Research finds exposure to 'untrustworthy' social media is rare, the fine print is less reassuring (2026, July 30) retrieved 30 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-exposure-untrustworthy-social-media-rare.html

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