Trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media
By Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Chuan Yu. 2018
693 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In recent years, there has been widespread concern that misinformation on social media is damaging societies and democratic institutions. In response, social media platforms have announced actions to limit the spread of false content. We measure trends in the diffusion of content from 569 fake news websites and 9540 fake news stories on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. User interactions with false content rose steadily on both Facebook and Twitter through the end of 2016. Since then, however, interactions with false content have fallen sharply on Facebook while continuing to rise on Twitter, with the ratio of Facebook engagements to Twitter shares decreasing by 60%. In comparison, interactions with other news, business, or culture sites have followed similar trends on both platforms. Our results suggest that the relative magnitude of the misinformation problem on Facebook has declined since its peak.
Subfields: Communication, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Communication
- Gordon Pennycook
- David G. Rand
- Jabin Binnendyk
- Christie Newton
- Jeffrey T. Hancock
- Nicholas C. Dias
- Brendan Nyhan
In Information Systems
In Sociology and Political Science
- David G. Rand
- Gordon Pennycook
- Jabin Binnendyk
- Christie Newton
- Jeffrey T. Hancock
- Mufan Luo
- David M. Markowitz
- Nicholas C. Dias
Citations in the corpus
- A Practical Guide to Doing Behavioral Research on Fake News and Misinformation (2020, background): “…desirable to present the image in “Facebook format” – i.e., in the way that the headline would look if it were shared on Facebook (which is a particularly common source for fake news, at least in North America; Allcott et al., 2019; Del Vicario There are, of course, cases where this does not hold.”
- Credibility Perceptions and Detection Accuracy of Fake News Headlines on Social Media: Effects of Truth-Bias and Endorsement Cues (2020, background): “As Allcott et al. (2019) have shown, fake news exposure appears to be declining on Facebook, suggesting that people are less likely to be exposed to fake news than in the past several years.”
- The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020, neutral): “2A recent literature has analyzed what appears to be an increase in the supply of fake news, especially online (Allcott et al., 2019; Flynn et al., 2017; Lazer et al., 2018).”