Less Than You Think: Prevalence and Predictors of Fake News Dissemination on Facebook from Science Advances

Reporters with various forms of “fake news” from an 1894 illustration by Frederick Burr Opper. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor1 print : chromolithograph. | Print shows a newspaper owner, possibly meant to be Joseph Pulitzer, sitting in a chair in his office next to an open safe where "Profits" are spilling out onto the floor; outside this scene are many newspaper reporters for the "Daily Splurge" rushing to the office to toss their stories onto the printing press; this is a fragment from that illustration

Jonathan Nagler

Joshua Tucker

Abstract

So-called “fake news” has renewed concerns about the prevalence and effects of misinformation in political campaigns. Given the potential for widespread dissemination of this material, we examine the individual-level characteristics associated with sharing false articles during the 2016 US presidential campaign. To do so, we uniquely link an original survey with respondents’ sharing activity as recorded in Facebook profile data. First and foremost, we find that sharing this content was a relatively rare activity. Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates. We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.

Introduction

One of the most discussed phenomena in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was the spread and possible influence of “fake news”—false or misleading content intentionally dressed up to look like news articles, often for the purpose of generating ad revenue. Scholars and commentators have raised concerns about the implications of fake news for the quality of democratic discourse, as well as the prevalence of misinformation more generally (1). Some have gone so far as to assert that such content had a persuasive impact that could have affected the election outcome, although the best evidence suggests that these claims are farfetched (2). While evidence is growing on the prevalence (3), believability (2), and resistance to corrections (4, 5) of fake news during the 2016 campaign, less is known about the mechanisms behind its spread (6). Some of the earliest journalistic accounts of fake news highlighted its popularity on social media, especially Facebook (7). Visits to Facebook appear to be much more common than other platforms before visits to fake news articles in web consumption data, suggesting a powerful role for the social network (3), but what is the role of social transmission—in particular, social sharing—in the spread of this pernicious form of false political content? Here, we provide important new evidence complementing the small but growing body of literature on the fake news phenomenon.

Data and method

Our approach allows us to provide a comprehensive observational portrait of the individual-level characteristics related to posting articles from fake news–spreading domains to friends on social media. We link a representative online survey (N = 3500) to behavioral data on respondents’ Facebook sharing history during the campaign, avoiding known biases in self-reports of online activity (8, 9). Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics. Here, we mainly use measures constructed by reference to the list by Silverman (7), but in the Supplementary Materials, we show that the main results hold when alternate lists are used, such as that used by peer-reviewed studies (2).

Overall, sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity. We find some evidence that the most conservative users were more likely to share this content—the vast majority of which was pro-Trump in orientation—than were other Facebook users, although this is sensitive to coding and based on a small number of respondents. Our most robust finding is that the oldest Americans, especially those over 65, were more likely to share fake news to their Facebook friends. This is true even when holding other characteristics—including education, ideology, and partisanship—constant. No other demographic characteristic seems to have a consistent effect on sharing fake news, making our age finding that much more notable.

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