Science Advances
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Empirical study on misinformation prevalence in media diets, relevant to AI safety discussions about content moderation, algorithmic amplification, and understanding the actual scale of fake news problems that AI systems are designed to address.
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This Science Advances study challenges the conventional narrative about fake news prevalence using a comprehensive, nationally representative dataset covering mobile, desktop, and television consumption. The research finds that fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet, news consumption overall represents at most 14.2% of media consumption, and television accounts for roughly five times more news consumption than online sources. The authors argue that public misinformation and polarization are more likely attributable to the content of mainstream news or news avoidance rather than overt fake news, suggesting the scale of the fake news crisis has been significantly overstated.
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Contents
## Abstract
“Fake news,” broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. Using a unique multimode dataset that comprises a nationally representative sample of mobile, desktop, and television consumption, we refute this conventional wisdom on three levels. First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans’ daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet. Our results suggest that the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery.
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## INTRODUCTION
Since the 2016 U.S. 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_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R1)– [_10_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R10)). 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_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R11)– [_14_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R14)). Recently, a handful of papers have attempted to measure the prevalence of fake news on social media ( [_1_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R1), [_8_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R8), [_9_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539#core-collateral-R9)), finding that exposure is rare compared with other types of news content and generally concentrated among older, politically conservative Americans. 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_](https://www.science.org/doi/10.
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