Ever since the 2016 presidential election, fake news has become an increasing concern because of how fast it spreads and how corrosive it can be to democratic institutions that depend on a properly informed citizenry.
Social scientists and others have been trying to study and better understand the phenomenon. Last year, scientists from MIT published a study in Science of how stories were disseminated on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 and found that false stories spread much faster and to far more people than true ones (“Lies and False News Spread Faster …” SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, July/August 2018).