In the aftermath of the twin shocks of 2016—Brexit on one side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump on the other—many in the media identified “fake news” as the culprit and as one of the emergent evils of the modern world. It was invoked the way terrorism was after 9/11: shadowy, stateless, destabilizing. It’s no surprise that, by June 2019, 50 percent of Americans viewed it as a bigger threat than terrorism, with 70 percent saying that it was greatly affecting trust in government institutions.



“Fake news,” of course, has led a double life. The term describes the spread of disinformation by Russian troll farms. It is also one of Donald Trump’s favorite phrases, which he barks at the reporters who document his corrupt administration. Charges of fake news once discredited figures like Trump—if the election that brought him to power was tainted by bots slinging propaganda, he cannot be a legitimate president—but they are also now used to discredit news organizations trying to hold the powerful accountable.



Still, fake news in the original sense is an abiding concern. We have been inundated with statistics documenting the millions of fake news stories on Facebook and Twitter and who was likely to fall for them. There have been congressional hearings about fake news, and Fiona Hill, a former foreign policy adviser in Trump’s White House, warned about foreign election interference during her testimony at November’s impeachment hearings. Disgust with fake news has led to a sharp drop in popularity for companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have been rightly blamed for doing too little to stop its spread on their platforms.



For all its ubiquity, though, fake news itself is not particularly well understood. We’re finally beginning to get studies about its actual efficacy. And the early academic literature suggests that the fear of fake news’s uniquely destructive power may be overblown.



In February 2018, Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan looked at the emerging academic work and concluded that, while “much more remains to be learned about the effects of these types of online activities,” we “should not assume they had huge effects.” In general, there is little evidence suggesting that fake news has had a major impact on how people view current events. Furthermore, fake news is most likely to reach “heavy news consumers,” whose opinions have already been set.

