In order to stop the spread of fake news for the 2020 U.S. elections, social media companies may need to limit how frequently its users are allowed to post, said David Lazer, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science at Northeastern, who recently published a new report on fake news during the 2016 election.
The study, which examined how people shared fake news and how often people were exposed to it on Twitter, found that a massive amount of fake news was produced and consumed by a very small amount of users.
There is not widespread agreement on what constitutes “fake news.”
Lazer defines it as a “subgenre of misinformation,” calling it “information regarding the state of the world that’s constructed with disregard of the facts and invokes the symbols of existing truth-tellers. It misinforms by appealing to the very worst of human nature, and undermines truth-tellers at the same time.
