
Thus, in accordance with the previous literature, with the notable exception of YouTube, fake news is defined at the publisher or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) level.
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Correspondingly, fake news consumption is the time spent on 1 of 98 websites previously identified by researchers ( 8), professional fact checkers, and journalists as sources of fake, deceptive, low-quality, or hyperpartisan news. Online (mobile and desktop) news consumption is defined as time spent on any article published on one of more than 800 websites, adapted from ( 21), that primarily cover “hard” news topics like politics, business, and U.S.

Second, we measure desktop and mobile media consumption (including media consumed through mobile applications) using Comscore’s nationally representative desktop and mobile panel, which breaks out total time spent on different types of media sites including news, search, and social media by demographic bucket. While comprehensive measures of prevalence are intrinsically interesting and can indicate how much relative impact different types of content would have to have to dominate, they cannot on their own resolve questions about influence. Third, even if its prevalence is low relative to other types of content, fake news could be important either because it is disproportionately impactful or because it is concentrated on small subpopulations. Because the volume of online content is so vast, even a very large numerator may constitute only a tiny fraction of the total ( 19). Second, analyses of fake news often fail to account for how much of it is consumed relative to other types of news or non–news-related content.

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For example, many studies rely exclusively on Twitter, whose users are highly unrepresentative of the general population ( 17), while even studies that rely on representative online panels omit TV consumption ( 18). As a result, researchers select data sources on the basis of their availability, which may not correspond with either representativeness or comprehensiveness. First, Americans consume news online via desktop computers and, increasingly, mobile devices as well as on television (TV) yet, no single source of data covers all three modes. Disagreements over the prevalence and importance of misinformation are difficult to evaluate empirically for three reasons.


Despite these findings, many researchers and other observers continue to advocate that deliberately engineered misinformation disseminated on social media is sufficiently prevalent to constitute an urgent crisis ( 15, 16). Recently, a handful of papers have attempted to measure the prevalence of fake news on social media ( 1, 8, 9), finding that exposure is rare compared with other types of news content and generally concentrated among older, politically conservative Americans. In large part, this interest reflects a deeper concern that the prevalence of “fake news” has increased political polarization, decreased trust in public institutions, and undermined democracy ( 11– 14). presidential election, the deliberate spread of online misinformation, in particular on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, has generated extraordinary interest across several disciplines ( 1– 10).
