The science of fake news

TL;DR

This paper reviews the multidisciplinary challenges of fake news, emphasizing detection, understanding its spread, and mitigation strategies involving individuals and platforms, highlighting the need for platform-research cooperation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the current knowledge on fake news, proposing strategies for detection and mitigation, and emphasizing platform-research collaboration.

Findings

Fake news spread is complex and requires multidisciplinary understanding.

Mitigation involves empowering individuals and platform interventions.

Collaboration with major Internet platforms is crucial for effective solutions.

Abstract

Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its potentially harmful effects. This will require a better understanding of how the Internet spreads content, how people process news, and how the two interact. We review the state of knowledge in these areas and discuss two broad potential mitigation strategies: better enabling individuals to identify fake news, and intervention within the platforms to reduce the attention given to fake news. The cooperation of Internet platforms (especially Facebook, Google, and Twitter) with researchers will be critical to understanding the scale of the issue and the effectiveness of possible interventions.