Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 24, 2025

An Experimental Analysis of Children's Ability to Provide a False Report about a Crime
Published on: May 3, 2016
Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem
Jennifer Allen1, Baird Howland2, Markus Mobius3
1MIT Sloan School of Management, 100 Main St., Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Abstract:
"Fake news," broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. Using a unique multimode dataset that comprises a nationally representative sample of mobile, desktop, and television consumption, we refute this conventional wisdom on three levels. First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans' daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet. Our results suggest that the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery.
Related Concept Videos
Social Foundations of Self IV: Self in Digital Communication
Understanding Deception
False Memories
One primary source of false memories is misattribution, where individuals incorrectly associate external information...
The Sense of Self: Reflected Self-Appraisal and Social Comparison
Groupthink
Steps in Outbreak Investigation
