“We take misinformation seriously,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote just weeks after the 2016 election. In the year since, the question of how to counteract the damage done by “fake news” has become a pressing issue both for technology companies and governments across the globe.
Yet as widespread as the problem is, opportunities to glimpse misinformation in action are fairly rare. Most users who generate misinformation do not share accurate information too, so it can be difficult to tease out the effect of misinformation itself. For example, when President Trump shares misinformation on Twitter, his tweets tend to go viral. But they may not be going viral because of the misinformation: All those retweets may instead owe to the popularity of Trump’s account, or the fact that he writes about politically charged subjects. Without a corresponding set of accurate tweets from Trump, there’s no way of knowing what role misinformation is playing.