Fake news outperformed reputable news in social media engagement in 2016

Evidence

An analysis by Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed News found that the top twenty fake news stories in the three months before the election were shared or liked a total of 8.7 million times on Facebook. Over the same period, the top twenty news stories from reputable sources got only 7.3 million Facebook shares or likes. In another study, economists Hunt Allcott at New York University and Matthew Gentzkow at Stanford compiled a database of 115 pro-Trump and 41 pro-Clinton fake news stories that, together, were shared 38 million times in the weeks before the election. — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 18

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to work on the attention economy and platform incentives rewarding engagement over accuracy. — connects to: Health misinformation moved from fringe to mainstream political discourse — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 53; An honest journalist sharing only surprising results can mislead the public — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 527; Fake news made up under 6 percent of the 2016 media diet — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 524 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Fake news made up under 6 percent of the 2016 media diet #qualifies (0.85) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 524
• Americans in 2016 each read roughly three fake news stories in the election build-up #contradicts (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1611