The economists’ estimate that fake news was rare depends on sampling and memory assumptions

Evidence

I must admit that I was fairly dismissive of this estimate, if not solely based on my personal experience of definitely seeing more than one fake news article during the 2016 presidential election. The economists based their model on a lot of assumptions, and it’s up to the reader to decide how reasonable these are. For one, is their list of 156 fake news stories representative of the full universe of fake news stories? Probably not as it contains only a subsample of fact-checked headlines that mostly excluded manipulative and biased news media, which are much more prevalent. We can also question whether people can accurately remember what fake news they were exposed to, or whether the researchers’ quiz of fifteen items was a good representative test of that. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the author’s central doubt theme (Foolproof debunks debunking) and echoes the Mencken-style distrust of self-reported exposure measures. Also parallels the placebo-memory base-rate problem found in survey methodologies generally. — connects to: Self-reported fake news exposure greatly exceeds model-based estimates — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 525; The truth of self-reports cannot justify the prejudiced-unprejudiced contrast; probability assumptions underwrite it — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 535
• SEED: The author openly admits his prior (personal experience trumping data) — a candid epistemic moment that could anchor a craft essay on how researchers reconcile anecdotal certainty with aggregate estimates.

Broader Connections

• Self-reported fake news exposure greatly exceeds model-based estimates #expands (0.80) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 525
• The truth of self-reports cannot justify the prejudiced-unprejudiced contrast; probability assumptions underwrite it #expands (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 535