Writing for Ars Technica, Scott K. Johnson has a useful summary of fake news research by Andrew M. Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, recently published in Nature Human Behavior.
Overall, the researchers conclude that “widespread speculation about the prevalence of exposure to untrustworthy websites has been overstated.” Of course, not everything is captured in their dataset, like content viewed purely within Facebook, for example, or the effects of misinformation on the broader information ecosystem. But it is a unique study that supports what others have found—a relatively small fraction of the public is consuming much of what the researchers call “factually dubious content.”
