Americans in 2016 each read roughly three fake news stories in the election build-up

Evidence

Economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, who have studied these phenomena in detail, define “fake news” as “distorted signals uncorrelated with the truth” that impose “private and social costs by making it more difficult… to infer the true state of the world.…” They found that in the lead-up to the 2016 US election there were 760 million instances of a user reading these intentionally orchestrated lies online, or about three such stories for each adult American. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1611

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides an economist’s formal definition of fake news as truth-uncorrelated distorted signals.
• CANDY: The 760-million / three-per-adult figure is a concrete, snackable stat for elevator conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Copied stories across conspiracy sites create false impressions of source diversity. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 393; Fake news outperformed reputable news in social media engagement in 2016 — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 18; Fake news made up under 6 percent of the 2016 media diet — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 524 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Copied stories across conspiracy sites create false impressions of source diversity. #expands (0.78) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 393