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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

> When enough fake news is spread, serious things can happen. Bad things. At a small scale, an individual’s reputation can be ruined. At a larger one, a foreign government can manipulate the outcome of a rival’s election.

people keep repeating this like it is a truism, but how many specific examples are there of this and how much damage does fake news really do? Which specific piece of fake news influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Where are these fake news stories that are always going viral? The only viral fake news that I have seen are The Onion and Babylon Bee but those are intentional satires.

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You're asking for data and then using your anecdotal experience as proof that whatever data you're going to get will be false.

Do you see how that A) puts the burden of research you should do yourself onto someone else, and B) tells people that you won't believe them anyway?

There have been thousands of articles and studies with specific examples. You should try Googling it first and build up a real counterpoint before telling people you don't believe all the research.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0833-x

A team of researchers led by Andrew Guess of Princeton University tracked the internet use of over 3000 Americans in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. They found Facebook to be the referrer site for untrustworthy news sources over 15% of the time. By contrast, Facebook referred users to authoritative news sites only 6% of the time.

The authors state, “This pattern of differential Facebook visits immediately prior to untrustworthy website visits is not observed for Google (3.3% untrustworthy news versus 6.2% hard news) or Twitter (1% untrustworthy versus 1.5% hard news).”

is there updated data from the 2020 election? FB has done a lot sine 2016

and more:

"approximately 57% of Trump supporters read at least one fake news article in the month prior to the 2016 election compared to only 28% of Clinton supporters. Older Americans were also more likely to visit untrustworthy news websites.

Perhaps most alarming is the observed “stickiness” of fake news websites. The researchers estimate that people spend an average of 64 seconds consuming a fake news articles compared to only 42 seconds on verified news stories."

These statistics do not mean much if based on a politically biased definition of what "fake news" is. I count much of the mainstream left-leaning media's reporting on BLM-related issues as fake news because it is based on an accidental or deliberate misreading of crime and policing statistics. If you used my definition of fake news, the percentages that you quote would probably be quite different.

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