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These resources will assist in fact-checking information that you have located and will provide the necessary skills to fact check on your own!

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Want to try your hand at creating fake news and misinformation? Try out these games! They will give ideas about how to create your own fake news or what to look out for when creating your newsletters.

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Identifying “Fake” News | Common Sense Education | PBS LearningMedia

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What is “fake” news? How do we know it’s false? Use these resources from Common Sense Education to help students investigate the way information is presented so that they can analyze what they read and see on the Web. This resource is part of the News and Media Literacy Collection.

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We are the most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet. Don't be fooled by Fake News sources. Search Media Bias. View Fact Checks. Breaking News.

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The definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

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Play the role of a journalist covering a breaking news story in the BBC iReporter game.

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Inoculation Science - Games - Harmony Square

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A short, free-to-play online game in which players learn how political misinformation is produced and spread.

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Reality Check / Au-delà des faits! - Media Smarts

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Play the fake news game! How bad are you? Become a fake news tycoon and get as many followers as you can.

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If you finish your work early and would like to read more about the implications of Fake News. Read the following resources.

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One major concern about fake news is that it could damage the public trust in democratic institutions. We examined this possibility using longitudinal survey data combined with records of online behavior. Our study found that online misinformation was linked to lower trust in mainstream media across party lines. However, for moderates and conservatives, exposure to fake news predicted a higher confidence in political institutions. The mostly right-leaning fake news accessed by our moderate-to-conservative respondents could strengthen their trust in a Republican government. This was not true for liberals who could be biased against such content and less likely to believe its claims.

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Research Questions

Is exposure to fake news sources associated with lower trust in mass media?

Is exposure to fake news sources associated with lower trust in political institutions?

Essay Summary

We collected data from U.S. respondents (N=3000) who participated in two survey waves conducted a month apart from each other. The surveys were sent out in late October and late November of 2018, shortly before and shortly after the U.S. midterm elections.

Participants were also asked to install a browser extension tracking their online behavior during the time period between the surveys. About 8% (N=227) of the respondents agreed.

The browsing history of participating respondents was used to evaluate their exposure to fake news sources and assess whether consuming misinformation was linked to changes in trust.

We found that fake news exposure was associated with a decline in mainstream media trust among respondents.

Our results also showed that fake news exposure was associated with an overall increase in political trust, and especially trust in congress and the justice system.

Upon examining that relationship more closely, we found that fake news consumption was linked to lower political trust, but only for strong liberals. For moderates and conservatives, fake news consumption predicted higher trust in political institutions.

Our findings confirm that the consequences of fake news cannot be examined in isolation. To effectively anticipate the implications of misinformation spread, research needs to consider the current media and political environment.

Implications

The long-standing problem of political misinformation drew public attention in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Scholars, journalists, and politicians expressed alarm that the spread of fake news could destabilize political institutions and delegitimize media organizations. Despite those widespread concerns, there is relatively little research exploring the consequences of fake news consumption in the current political environment. Even though its direct electoral impact in 2016 may have been limited (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017), online misinformation could have other important effects on our society.

In this work, fake news is defined as fabricated information that has the format of news content but not the editorial standards and practices of legitimate journalism (Lazer et al, 2018). Consumption of fake news makes people more likely to adopt various political misperceptions(Guess et al., 2020) that can affect their subsequent behavior, including voting decisions (Weeks & Garrett, 2014).

This work examines the potential of misinformation exposure to erode public confidence in key social institutions. We find evidence linking exposure to misinformation with trust in mainstream media and the federal government. Attitudes towards those institutions can, in turn, affect how people find and evaluate information; who they believe and how they act during exigent circumstances; as well as how they participate in the political process. Our findings thus emphasize the critical importance of technological, social, and regulatory efforts to curb the spread of fake news.

While this study has limitations, it showcases a novel approach to understanding the connection between fake news exposure and public opinion. The combination of longitudinal survey data and browser records provides a practical way to capture the complex interdependencies between individual attitudes and online behavior (see also Guess et al., 2020).
Media trust
In recent years, mainstream news organizations have experienced a considerable decline in public confidence (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2018). The consequences of this lack of trust are especially apparent in times of crisis and uncertainty when citizens are most in need of credible sources providing current and reliable information. To the extent that fake news can undermine the public's confidence in mainstream media, it may not only leave its consumers misinformed, but also make them more vulnerable when disaster strikes.

The content of false news stories can influence our confidence in the media. Cynical coverage and tabloid-style focus on scandal can erode citizen trust in news organizations (Hopmann, Shehata, & Stromback, 2015; Ladd, 2012). Those are characteristics typical of many fake news stories as their producers aim to increase audience engagement through sensational and divisive content.

Fake news can also discredit the press directly by accusing them of bias, complicity, and incompetence - or indirectly by contradicting a range of claims made by mainstream media. What is more, the very existence of online misinformation resembling a journalistic product can diminish the credibility of legitimate news. Confirming the relevance of those concerns, our study offers evidence that exposure to fake news is associated with a decline in the media trust of respondents.
Political trust
The impact of fake news on political trust has important consequences for our democracy. Public confidence in political institutions affects civic and electoral behavior, with distrustful citizens more likely to sit out an election or vote for a populist candidate (Hooghe, 2018). While in some cases concerns about poor government may lead to citizen mobilization, high levels of cynicism and mistrust can cause people to withdraw from participating in politics.

Research suggests that negative or biased reporting can reduce political trust and increase cynicism and apathy (Kleinnijenhuis, van Hoof, & Oegema, 2006). Similar considerations may apply in the case of fake news. Politically motivated fringe groups and foreign actors are said to spread misinformation mimicking the format of journalism specifically for the purpose of destabilizing democratic institutions (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Financially motivated fake news outlets produce sensational content often aiming to generate more views by appealing to partisan bias, triggering negative emotions, and fueling political arguments. Scandal and incivility in current affairs coverage can draw and hold public attention while at the same time lowering political trust (Bowler & Karp, 2004; Mutz & Reeves, 2005).

Based on its characteristics, many observers expect that fake news is eroding political trust. Some sources of misinformation, however, can be portrayed more accurately as working to shift trust from mainstream institutions to fringe organizations, or from one political entity to another. While a citizen decline in political trust can be harmful, an unwarranted increase in public confidence based on false stories would be similarly problematic. An unrealistically optimistic view of the government, for instance, can be dangerous if it convinces citizens that no further action or mobilization is needed.

In this work, we take steps towards unpacking the complicated relationship between consuming fabricated content and trust in political institutions. We observe that fake news is linked to a decrease in political trust among liberal respondents, but it is associated with an increase in political trust for moderates and conservatives. These findings highlight the importance of considering the current political context when examining the impact of misinformation. Whether fake news does erode public trust in political institutions is likely determined by the ideological lean of the news sources, the individuals who access them, and the current political elites running the country. Key characteristics of the content itself could also shift over time, changing its impact on public trust.

Findings

This study set out to investigate the impact of fake news consumption on confidence in democratic institutions. Combining two-wave survey data with records of online behavior, we examined the role of misinformation exposure (a binary variable) as a predictor of trust in the media and the political system. While a single fake news encounter may not affect attitudes, here we treat it as a signal that the respondent consumes at least some misinformation. It indicates that the person has visited one of the sites on our fake news list using the browser we track (see Appendix A). Given that people tend to use multiple browsers and devices, and that there are sources of misinformation we have not yet identified, it is likely that our methods underreport the actual fake news exposure of participants.
Finding 1: Consuming misinformation was associated with a general decrease in media trust.
Fake news sources often target mainstream media organizations by accusing them of bias and incompetence. Perhaps more importantly, sensational and made-up stories that mimic the format of journalism could damage the credibility of all news content. With that in mind, journalists and scholars have expressed concerns that exposure to fabricated news would reduce people's confidence in the press. Our research found evidence confirming that assumption. Misinformation exposure during the one-month period around the 2018 election did predict a 5% decrease in media trust among our participants. Furthermore, consuming fake news was associated with lower mainstream media trust across all levels of political ideology.
Finding 2: Consuming misinformation was associated with a general increase in political trust.
In contrast to the negative relationship between fake news exposure and media trust, we found that consuming misinformation was associated with an increase in political trust. This link was especially strong for people's confidence in the U.S. Congress, an institution covered extensively by news media around the 2018 midterm elections. Fake news consumption was associated with a 4% increase in political trust and an 8% increase for trust in Congress.

Figure 1. Trust in politics and mass media. The figure shows standardized coefficients from ordinary least squares regressions predicting political trust (on the left) and media trust (on the right). Variables whose error bars are to the right (left) of the zero line are positively (negatively) associated with the outcome.

During our data collection, the majority of fake news sources identified by scholars and fact-checking organizations produced content with a far-right ideology (Guess, Nagler, & Tucker, 2019). This was also reflected in our own data, as shown in Appendix C, which describes the fake news outlets visited by our study participants.

In late 2018, Republicans were in power in the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives. The Supreme Court had five justices appointed by Republican presidents and four appointed by Democrats. The recently confirmed Justice Brett Kavanaugh had just replaced the more moderate Anthony Kennedy. With all branches of government under Republican control, it may not be surprising that the predominantly right-leaning fake news content would bolster rather than erode confidence in political institutions. As demonstrated in previous research (Ceron & Memoli, 2015), consuming pro-government content leads to increased political trust, especially among citizens who are already predisposed to be supportive of the current political institutions.
Finding 3: While the overall association between fake news consumption and political trust was positive, there were differences among ideological subgroups. Strong liberals trusted the government less after consuming fake news, while moderates and conservatives trusted it more.
Further exploration of the relationship between political trust and misinformation consumption revealed a more complicated story. For strong liberals, exposure to fabricated news was indeed linked to lower political trust. For moderates and conservatives, however, fake news consumption predicted higher trust in political institutions. This finding demonstrates that we cannot examine the effects of misinformation in isolation: its impact on citizens depends on the way in which the ideological messages present in fake news interact with the political context. In our data, strong liberals exposed to right-leaning misinformation may be most likely to reject its claims and mistrust the current Republican government. In contrast, moderate or conservative respondents may take that misinformation at face value and increase their confidence in the current political institutions.

The nature of political trust and distrust has been the subject of a long-standing debate in political science. Trust can be seen as a construct that captures our attitudes towards regimes, institutions, and policies (Miller, 1974). Alternatively, we can think of political trust as mostly reflective of our ideological agreement with the actors who govern the country at a given time (Citrin, 1974). If the former perspective holds, eroding trust could have long-term negative consequences on the way people see democratic institutions. The alternative would suggest that trust can be damaged and repaired more easily as individuals and groups transition in and out of power. Research has found some support for the latter view as people report higher levels of trust in the political system when their party is running the country (Anderson, Blais, Bowler, Donovan, & Listhaug, 2005; Keele, 2005).

The link between political trust and ideological alignment with the governing party can further illuminate our findings. Researchers have suggested that the polarization of political trust is associated with ideologically motivated reasoning (Hetherington & Rudolph, 2018). Motivated processing of information could lead to considerable differences in the way liberals and conservatives react to right-leaning fake news. Strong Democrats would be most motivated to evaluate right-wing content critically, distrust the source, and counter-argue messages that challenge their political beliefs. Moderates and conservatives may be more willing to overlook the problematic source and accept pro-government claims at face value. Conversely, strong Democrats would be most susceptible to any left-leaning fake news criticizing the government. Overall, motivated reasoning could result in patterns much like the ones found in this study: exposure to misinformation would be linked to a decrease in political trust for liberals and an increase for conservatives.

Figure 2. Interaction plot showing predicted values of trust in political institutions at different levels of ideology and fake news exposure, control variables held at mean.

As in previous research, the fake news content accessed by participants in our sample was predominantly right-leaning (see Appendix C), while the stories retrieved from legitimate sources were more balanced. The most read traditional news stories included Senate and House election coverage from the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight. The top posts from fake news sources included stories about Democrats attempting to discourage gun owners from voting; Republican Senator Ted Cruz being attacked by angry protesters at dinner; and a gay man accusing Democratic Senator Cory Booker of sexual misconduct.

While our analyses do show a link between fake news consumption and institutional trust, we cannot claim with certainty that this relationship is causal. Our results are suggestive, but unobserved confounding and reverse causality remain possible. Additional tests allow us to rule out some of the plausible alternative explanations. For instance, one might ask whether our results are specific to misinformation exposure. Would we see the same patterns when people consume other content, as long as it is similarly ideologically skewed? At least in our data, that was not the case. Consuming legitimate right-leaning news was positively associated with increased trust in the White House, but not in other political institutions. Notably, it was not linked to a decline in the media trust of participants. We conducted further tests by adding separate controls for exposure to right-wing (Fox news) and far-right (Breitbart News) content to our main models. Including those separately or together did not alter the estimates for fake news (see table B3 and B4 in Appendix B).

Methods
Data collection
The data used in this study was collected by the opinion polling company YouGov. A total of 3,000 participants completed two surveys conducted shortly before and after the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. The first survey wave was fielded between October 18 and October 24 of 2018. The second wave was collected between November 23 and December 1 of 2018.

During the initial recruitment, survey respondents were also invited to participate in our digital data collection taking place in October and November of 2018. Individuals who consented were asked to install a browser extension compatible with Google Chrome and Firefox. This extension operated until December 1 and periodically collected the web browsing history of each participant.

The time period when we collected the digital data was characterized by considerable public attention to political news and events in the United States. On November 6, 2018, many states in the country had their first major election since Donald Trump was voted into office. In the weeks following the election, both the public and the media were focused on the results and their implications for American political life. The increased attention to political events at that time would likely strengthen the effects of exposure to mainstream and fake news content.

Out of the 3,000 respondents who completed both survey waves, a subsample of 227 (8%) agreed to install the browser extension and participate in the digital data collection. The analyses conducted here were based on that smaller sample. While the resulting dataset includes a relatively modest number of participants, it contains a very detailed and rich record of their online behavior. Trends in the data that are prominent enough can be captured even with this relatively small sample. A sensitivity power analysis for the study models and sample size (n = 227, a = .05, power set to .80) indicated that effect sizes as small as f ² = .04 could be detected.

Demographic characteristics of the respondents who took part in the digital data collection are available in Appendix A, Table A1 and A2. While it was relatively diverse given its constraints, the sample underrepresented female, Black, and Hispanic U.S. residents when compared to the 2018 Census Current Population Survey. To improve the representativeness of our results, we applied post-stratification weighting for gender, race, age, education, and geographic region (Northeast, Midwest, South, or West) prior to analyzing the data.
Variable measurement
Detailed information about the way we constructed all variables used in this study, as well as tables showing their descriptive characteristics, can be found in Appendix A.

Fake news exposure was determined based on the browser history of participants. People were considered to be exposed if they had visited any of the sources in a list of domains categorized as fake news by Grinberg and colleagues (2019).

Trust in media and political institutions was measured using items adapted from the General Social Survey (GSS). Respondents were asked how much confidence they had in mass media, the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, and the justice system. To provide a more nuanced understanding of the connection between fake news exposure and trust, the analyses reported in this study were conducted separately for each of the institutions listed above, as well as for a generalized measure of political trust which combined the five items pertaining to political institutions.

Control variables used in the analysis included gender, race and ethnicity, age, education, family income, party affiliation, political ideology, interest in politics, national news consumption, and number of visited news pages during the data collection period.
Data analysis
Prior to the analyses, we examined the item non-response levels for the two survey waves. The variables used in this study contained relatively little missing data. Missingness was 0% for the fake news exposure variable, less than 2% for the key dependent variables, and less than 5% for the control variables. The analyses were conducted using multiple imputation of the missing data.

After computing survey weights, we estimated regression models for each dependent variable measured in the second survey wave. Along with the other controls described in Appendix A, the model predictors included participant scores for the dependent variable in the first data collection wave. Controlling for pre-exposure levels of the dependent variable makes causal interpretations of its relationship with fake news consumption more plausible than they would otherwise be.

To examine the association between political trust and participant exposure to fake news sources, we estimated separate models for confidence in the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the justice system, and the combined political trust variable (all measured on a 1-5 scale). To further explore the relationship of misinformation and institutional trust, we estimated additional models that included terms for the interaction between fake news exposure and political ideology (see Appendix B, Table B2). In the model predicting trust in political institutions, the interaction was significant and positive. The model results and interaction plot suggest that fake news exposure differs in its impact on political trust depending on the person's ideology.

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Misinformation in action: Fake news exposure is linked to lower trust in media, higher trust in government when your side is in power | HKS Misinformation Review

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One major concern about fake news is that it could damage the public trust in democratic institutions. We examined this possibility using longitudinal survey data combined with records of online behavior. Our study found that online misinformation was linked to lower trust in mainstream media across party lines.

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On Sunday afternoon, a 28-year-old man walked into a Washington, D.C. ping-pong bar and pizzeria. He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle - hardly standard-issue hardware for a round of table tennis. He fired one or more shots, as people fled Comet Ping Pong, before surrendering to police officers. No one was injured.

Edgar Maddison Welch told police he had traveled from his home in Salisbury, N.C. to the nation's capital to investigate a pre-election conspiracy theory, wherein Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton allegedly led a child-trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong.

A false claim started by, you guessed it, fake news. (Here's a brief history on how #Pizzagate was born.)

Incidents like the #Pizzagate shooting signify just one step in a long, dark trail of real world consequences caused by fake news - one that started well before this year

Fake news, once confined to satire or the fringe bowels of the internet, has quickly become a contender for the most influential phrase of the year. Following Donald Trump's surprise election, story after story has questioned the role that fake news played in swaying voters - and for good reason. A BuzzFeed analysis found fake election news outperformed total engagement on Facebook when compared to the most popular election stories from 19 major news outlet combined. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described this allegation as "a pretty crazy idea" before ultimately announcing a move to deter misleading news. Later, Facebook and Google took steps to keep fake news sites from collecting revenue from their ad platforms.

To some degree, Zuckerberg's initial stance was warranted. A panel of experts told the NewsHour that it would be nearly impossible to prove that phony stories swayed the U.S. election in one direction or another, based on current research. On the flip side, they said incidents like the #Pizzagate shooting signify just one step in a long, dark trail of real world consequences caused by fake news - one that started well before this year. They argued that emerging technology may stem the tide of garbage news in the near future. And they highlighted one solution that already exists.
Before Pizzagate, came Ebola
Fake news comes in many flavors, like satire or intentional hoaxes, but computer scientist Filippo Menczer said sensational news and social media campaigns filled with mistruths - like the PizzaGate story - started to surge on the internet around 2010.

Blaming readers for spreading fake news from a cognitive perspective is somewhat equivalent to blaming a baby for soiling itself. They can't help it.

"That is the first time that we started studying it actively, and at that time, we found several cases of websites that were publishing completely fake and fabricated news, purely for political propaganda," said Menczer, who designs algorithms to track political messaging as director of Indiana University's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.

Menczer recalled an example that occurred in 2010 during the special election to fill the vacancy created by the death of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. Researchers at Wellesley College found that, in the hours before the election, a Republican group from Iowa used thousands of Twitter bots to spread misinformation about the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley. At the time, search engines prioritized "real-time information" from social media platforms, so these fake posts topped search results just as people headed to the polls.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on how computer scientists can analyze Twitter handles to determine whether or not they are political bots.
Six years ago, few fake news websites featured ads for their content, Menczer said. Their main goal was political gain. By his estimation, the cottage industry for phony stories appeared to take off during the 2014 Ebola crisis. The websites for places like National Report, which self identifies as political satire, began to resemble legitimate news sources. False stories on National Report like "Texas Town Quarantined After Family Of Five Test Positive For The Ebola Virus" feature elements like author biographies and video shorts embedded in the page to give the feel of authenticity, Menczer said. Whether those attributes or the "satirical writing" mislead people is hard to say. But the Texas story, which lacks a disclaimer in the body of the text that clearly identifies it as satire, was shared more than 330,000 times on Facebook according to MuckRack's WhoShared algorithm.

Irrational fears of the Ebola virus in the U.S. arguably drove web interest in this fake news story, as it likely did for any number of legitimate articles written during the outbreak. When the dust settled, America notched four imported cases and one death during the entire course of the epidemic, while in contrast Africa experienced around 30,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.

Yet the American news machine had its share of media casualties during the Ebola crisis. One example involved Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who volunteered to treat people in West Africa.

Upon returning on a flight through Newark, she was quarantined for 80 hours by the New Jersey Department of Health and Gov. Chris Christie, despite showing no conclusive symptoms. Even after an Ebola test came back and she was released, Gov. Christie reportedly said Hickox may be "tested for that again, because sometimes it takes a little bit longer to make a definitive determination," and that "There's no question the woman is ill, the question is what is her illness."

From Hickox's perspective, the modern news cycle did the rest.

"The statements were completely untrue, but they were printed and published. Interviews with Chris Christie were playing on the news," Hickox told NewsHour. "It was another example of when you have a politician who really has access to say whatever they want, even though it was completely inaccurate."

The negative ramifications occurred immediately. As Hickox journeyed home to Maine, her landlord left a voicemail on her partner's cell phone, asking them to move out. "Before I left for Sierra Leone, she was very supportive, and she told me how amazing it was that I had the skills to go help respond to the Ebola outbreak," Hickox recalled. "Then all of a sudden this woman doesn't want you to return home, even though I never had Ebola, I wasn't symptomatic and there was no reason for anyone to fear."

Trending news stories, both fake and real, buy into what's called the attention economy, whereby "if people pay attention to a certain topic, more information on that topic will be produced."

Those public fears ballooned when Maine Gov. Paul LePage followed in Christie's tracks and tried to enforce a similar quarantine. Maine police officers complained about fielding phone calls from concerned residents who had been duped by fake news articles. Hickox heard rumors from the police department about physical threats against her, and her partner ended up dropping out of nursing school because they wouldn't allow him to attend while he was living with her, she said. The couple opted to ultimately go on a widely publicized bike ride to, in essence, force a judge to make a decision about the quarantine, a point that was missed by the mainstream media, she said.

"The state hadn't met the burden of proof to say that I needed to be quarantined. No one really explained that," Hickox said. A Reuters headline at the time, for instance, read " Bike-riding nurse defies Ebola quarantine, on collision course with governor " - even though no court had issued an official quarantine at the time.

Hickox, who ultimately left Maine, said outside Christie and LePage, she wasn't sure who to blame for the unjustified hype around her story.

"Is it the media that causes public panic, or is it that we, the public, just desire drama and fear, and that therefore feeds into the media," Hickox asked.

Based on research, the answer is both, as Menczer detailed recently in an OpEd for The Conversation. Trending news stories, both fake and real, buy into what's called the attention economy, whereby "if people pay attention to a certain topic, more information on that topic will be produced."
Why your brain loves fake news
Tell me if you've heard this common refrain since the election: "If people were smarter, fake news wouldn't be a problem," or "Readers are responsible for telling fake news from the real stuff. Don't blame Facebook."

But to communications psychologist Dannagal Young, blaming readers for spreading fake news from a cognitive perspective is somewhat equivalent to blaming a baby for soiling itself. They can't help it.

This takeaway comes after a decade of studying how the human mind responds to political satire. Satire is arguably the most prevalent variety of fake news and arguably the best studied. The mental processing of satire is unique compared to other types of information, Young said, because it requires audience participation.

"So compared to what we see in traditional communication, there is this enhanced attention, enhanced interest and enhanced processing that happens," said Young, who works at the University of Delaware. "So things that you hear in the context of humor will be more on the top of your mind."

But here's where problem lies with fake news and the human mind. Our brains have a finite capacity for processing information and for remembering, so our minds make value judgments about what to keep. Humor tips the scales in favor of being remembered and recalled, even when counterarguments are strong.

"The special sauce of humor is that you might get people to entertain ideas of constructs that they otherwise might reject out of hand," she said, and this powerful mode of persuasion extends to sensational fake news as well. "When you have exposure to fake news or satire, or any content at all, as soon as those constructs have been accessed and brought into working memory, they are there. You can't un-think them."

This mental reflex may explain why caricature traits - "Al Gore is stiff and robotic" or "George W. Bush is dumb" - persist in the zeitgeist for so long despite being untrue, Young said.

These days, the trouble arises from people being unable to recognize irony in online satire, Young said. She offered the example of a recent Change.org petition - Allow Open Carry of Firearms at the Quicken Loans Arena during the RNC Convention in July. The petition was written as if real, and news outlets like USA Today assumed as much, but its gun control-supporting author was actually trying to portray what he viewed as hypocrisy from conservative politicians. Young argued spoken irony - think John Oliver - creates less confusion because its easier to recognize the tones of intent.
How to beat fake news
So, what happens next in the wild west of phony tales? Some are looking to robots to save the day. For example, the verbal themes of satire are so distinctive, so salient, that linguists like Victoria Rubin can engineer machine-learning algorithms to filter this brand of fake news from legitimate articles.

"We were able to reach about 86 percent accuracy, which means definitely eight out of 10 would be pinpointed as satire," said Rubin, who studies information and media at the University of Western Ontario. These algorithms are trained to spot the hallmarks of satire, like extra-long sentences or unexpected juxtapositions of random people and places, locations.

These programs, however, still struggle when it comes to identifying the type of misinformation present in sensational news items. Their attempts at a deception detector yielded a 63 percent success rate, which is better than the human ability to spot lies - 54 percent on average - but not by much.

In recent weeks, many have called on Facebook to develop such programs or other methods to stop fake news, but Young said the social media platform had tried long before fake news became a mainstream problem.

Unfollowing is one of the most efficient techniques to put yourself inside an echo chamber.

A year and a half ago, Young said Facebook rolled out satire labeling for stories from satirical sources like The Onion. She said readers disliked this option because part of the allure of satire is getting momentarily swept up before realizing the story is a joke.

Next, Facebook tried a button in the right corner of posts that allowed readers to flag posts as fake, but then satirical content producers like The Daily Currant protested, based on research to be published by Young in an upcoming book in 2017. Facebook appeared to change how flagged stories were distributed, and referrals from Facebook to The Daily Currant dropped by 95 percent within a few months.

Though this crowdsourced option for reporting fake news still exists, Young said its influence on the distribution of stories into news feeds may have been supplanted by the "reaction emojis" that Facebook introduced in February. But she wonders if a "Ha-ha" or "sad" emoji carries the weight in crowdsourcing remarks about misinformative news.

Both she and Menczer also question whether crowdsourcing is the best path to defeating fake news on social media.

"I have been a huge advocate of digital technologies as an inherently democratizing medium that's going to change everything. Now I'm like, 'Oh my God, we have destroyed ourselves," Young said, somewhat in jest.

Since the election, many have tossed blame on Facebook for creating "filter bubbles" or "echo chambers" in users' news feed. But this notion rings hollow because these platforms are designed to cater to a people's choices. These decisions, Young said, are driven by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. In other words, people share articles after reading only the headline, because they want to think they're right, she said. She votes for bringing back human gatekeepers to tailor trending news and to prevent fake stories from running amok.

Menczer recommended that social media users who want to avoid echo chambers should follow moderate news sources or organizations that don't necessarily match their most intimate viewpoints. Or, "don't unfollow people just because they post something you disagree with," he said. "Unfollowing is one of the most efficient techniques to put yourself inside an echo chamber."

Having lived through the consequences of such public behavior, Hickox is now cautious about how she views others in the news.

"I would encourage people to always be questioning whether they're only getting part of a story," Hickox said. "To make snap judgments that lead to fear and to discrimination against someone is not the right way, and will not get us anywhere."

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The very real consequences of fake news stories and why your brain can't ignore them

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On Sunday afternoon, a 28-year-old man walked into a Washington, D.C. ping-pong bar and pizzeria. He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle - hardly standard-issue hardware for a round of table tennis. He fired one or more shots, as people fled Comet Ping Pong, before surrendering to police officers.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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In late 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected "post-truth" as the word of the year, defining it as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

The 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the tumultuous U.S. presidential election highlighted how the digital age has affected news and cultural narratives. New information platforms feed the ancient instinct people have to find information that syncs with their perspectives: A 2016 study that analyzed 376 million Facebook users' interactions with over 900 news outlets found that people tend to seek information that aligns with their views.

This makes many vulnerable to accepting and acting on misinformation. For instance, after fake news stories in June 2017 reported Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin had died in a car crash its market value was reported to have dropped by $4 billion.

When BBC Future Now interviewed a panel of 50 experts in early 2017 about the " grand challenges we face in the 21st century " many named the breakdown of trusted information sources. "The major new challenge in reporting news is the new shape of truth," said Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine. "Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people."

Americans worry about that: A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the 2016 election found 64% of adults believe fake news stories cause a great deal of confusion and 23% said they had shared fabricated political stories themselves - sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally.

The question arises, then: What will happen to the online information environment in the coming decade? In summer 2017, Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large canvassing of technologists, scholars, practitioners, strategic thinkers and others, asking them to react to this framing of the issue:
The rise of "fake news" and the proliferation of doctored narratives that are spread by humans and bots online are challenging publishers and platforms. Those trying to stop the spread of false information are working to design technical and human systems that can weed it out and minimize the ways in which bots and other schemes spread lies and misinformation. The question: In the next 10 years, will trusted methods emerge to block false narratives and allow the most accurate information to prevail in the overall information ecosystem? Or will the quality and veracity of information online deteriorate due to the spread of unreliable, sometimes even dangerous, socially destabilizing ideas?
Respondents were then asked to choose one of the following answer options:

The information environment will improve - In the next 10 years, on balance, the information environment will be IMPROVED by changes that reduce the spread of lies and other misinformation online.

The information environment will NOT improve - In the next 10 years, on balance, the information environment will NOT BE improved by changes designed to reduce the spread of lies and other misinformation online.

Some 1,116 responded to this nonscientific canvassing: 51% chose the option that the information environment will not improve, and 49% said the information environment will improve. (See " About this canvassing of experts " for details about this sample.) Participants were next asked to explain their answers. This report concentrates on these follow-up responses.

Their reasoning revealed a wide range of opinions about the nature of these threats and the most likely solutions required to resolve them. But the overarching and competing themes were clear: Those who do not think things will improve felt that humans mostly shape technology advances to their own, not-fully-noble purposes and that bad actors with bad motives will thwart the best efforts of technology innovators to remedy today's problems.

And those who are most hopeful believed that technological fixes can be implemented to bring out the better angels guiding human nature.

More specifically, the 51% of these experts who expect things will not improve generally cited two reasons:

The fake news ecosystem preys on some of our deepest human instincts: Respondents said humans' primal quest for success and power - their "survival" instinct - will continue to degrade the online information environment in the next decade. They predicted that manipulative actors will use new digital tools to take advantage of humans' inbred preference for comfort and convenience and their craving for the answers they find in reinforcing echo chambers.

Our brains are not wired to contend with the pace of technological change: These respondents said the rising speed, reach and efficiencies of the internet and emerging online applications will magnify these human tendencies and that technology-based solutions will not be able to overcome them. They predicted a future information landscape in which fake information crowds out reliable information. Some even foresaw a world in which widespread information scams and mass manipulation cause broad swathes of public to simply give up on being informed participants in civic life.

The 49% of these experts who expect things to generally inverted that reasoning:

Technology can help fix these problems: These more hopeful experts said the rising speed, reach and efficiencies of the internet, apps and platforms can be harnessed to rein in fake news and misinformation campaigns. Some predicted better methods will arise to create and promote trusted, fact-based news sources.

It is also human nature to come together and fix problems: The hopeful experts in this canvassing took the view that people have always adapted to change and that this current wave of challenges will also be overcome. They noted that misinformation and bad actors have always existed but have eventually been marginalized by smart people and processes. They expect well-meaning actors will work together to find ways to enhance the information environment. They also believe better information literacy among citizens will enable people to judge the veracity of material content and eventually raise the tone of discourse.

The majority of participants in this canvassing wrote detailed elaborations on their views. Some chose to have their names connected to their answers; others opted to respond anonymously. These findings do not represent all possible points of view, but they do reveal a wide range of striking observations.

Respondents collectively articulated several major themes tied to those insights and explained in the sections below the following graphic. Several longer additional sets of responses tied to these themes follow that summary.

The following section presents an overview of the themes found among the written responses, including a small selection of representative quotes supporting each point. Some comments are lightly edited for style or length.

Theme 1: The information environment will not improve: The problem is human nature

Most respondents who expect the environment to worsen said human nature is at fault. For instance, Christian H. Huitema, former president of the Internet Architecture Board, commented, "The quality of information will not improve in the coming years, because technology can't improve human nature all that much."

These experts predicted that the problem of misinformation will be amplified because the worst side of human nature is magnified by bad actors using advanced online tools at internet speed on a vast scale.

Tom Rosenstiel, author, director of the American Press Institute and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commented, "Whatever changes platform companies make, and whatever innovations fact checkers and other journalists put in place, those who want to deceive will adapt to them. Misinformation is not like a plumbing problem you fix. It is a social condition, like crime, that you must constantly monitor and adjust to. Since as far back as the era of radio and before, as Winston Churchill said, 'A lie can go around the world before the truth gets its pants on.'"

Michael J. Oghia, an author, editor and journalist based in Europe, said he expects a worsening of the information environment due to five things: "1) The spread of misinformation and hate; 2) Inflammation, sociocultural conflict and violence; 3) The breakdown of socially accepted/agreed-upon knowledge and what constitutes 'fact.' 4) A new digital divide of those subscribed (and ultimately controlled) by misinformation and those who are 'enlightened' by information based on reason, logic, scientific inquiry and critical thinking. 5) Further divides between communities, so that as we are more connected we are farther apart. And many others."

Leah Lievrouw, professor in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, observed, "So many players and interests see online information as a uniquely powerful shaper of individual action and public opinion in ways that serve their economic or political interests (marketing, politics, education, scientific controversies, community identity and solidarity, behavioral 'nudging,' etc.). These very diverse players would likely oppose (or try to subvert) technological or policy interventions or other attempts to insure the quality, and especially the disinterestedness, of information."

Subtheme: More people = more problems. The internet's continuous growth and accelerating innovation allow more people and artificial intelligence (AI) to create and instantly spread manipulative narratives

While propaganda and the manipulation of the public via falsehoods is a tactic as old as the human race, many of these experts predicted that the speed, reach and low cost of online communication plus continuously emerging innovations will magnify the threat level significantly. A professor at a Washington, D.C.-area university said, "It is nearly impossible to implement solutions at scale - the attack surface is too large to be defended successfully."

Jerry Michalski, futurist and founder of REX, replied, "The trustworthiness of our information environment will decrease over the next decade because: 1) It is inexpensive and easy for bad actors to act badly; 2) Potential technical solutions based on strong ID and public voting (for example) won't quite solve the problem; and 3) real solutions based on actual trusted relationships will take time to evolve - likely more than a decade."

An institute director and university professor said, "The internet is the 21st century's threat of a 'nuclear winter,' and there's no equivalent international framework for nonproliferation or disarmament. The public can grasp the destructive power of nuclear weapons in a way they will never understand the utterly corrosive power of the internet to civilized society, when there is no reliable mechanism for sorting out what people can believe to be true or false."

Bob Frankston, internet pioneer and software innovator, said, "I always thought that 'Mein Kampf' could be countered with enough information. Now I feel that people will tend to look for confirmation of their biases and the radical transparency will not shine a cleansing light."

David Harries, associate executive director for Foresight Canada, replied, "More and more, history is being written, rewritten and corrected, because more and more people have the ways and means to do so. Therefore there is ever more information that competes for attention, for credibility and for influence. The competition will complicate and intensify the search for veracity. Of course, many are less interested in veracity than in winning the competition."

Glenn Edens, CTO for technology reserve at PARC, a Xerox company, commented, "Misinformation is a two-way street. Producers have an easy publishing platform to reach wide audiences and those audiences are flocking to the sources. The audiences typically are looking for information that fits their belief systems, so it is a really tough problem."

Subtheme: Humans are by nature selfish, tribal, gullible convenience seekers who put the most trust in that which seems familiar

The respondents who supported this view noted that people's actions - from consciously malevolent and power-seeking behaviors to seemingly more benign acts undertaken for comfort or convenience - will work to undermine a healthy information environment.

An executive consultant based in North America wrote, "It comes down to motivation: There is no market for the truth. The public isn't motivated to seek out verified, vetted information. They are happy hearing what confirms their views. And people can gain more creating fake information (both monetary and in notoriety) than they can keeping it from occurring."

Serge Marelli, an IT professional who works on and with the Net, wrote, "As a group, humans are 'stupid.' It is 'group mind' or a 'group phenomenon' or, as George Carlin said, 'Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.' Then, you have Kierkegaard, who said, 'People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.' And finally, Euripides said, 'Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.'"

Starr Roxanne Hiltz, distinguished professor of information systems and co-author of the visionary 1970s book " The Network Nation," replied, "People on systems like Facebook are increasingly forming into 'echo chambers' of those who think alike. They will keep unfriending those who don't, and passing on rumors and fake news that agrees with their point of view. When the president of the U.S. frequently attacks the traditional media and anybody who does not agree with his 'alternative facts,' it is not good news for an uptick in reliable and trustworthy facts circulating in social media."

Nigel Cameron, a technology and futures editor and president of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, said, "Human nature is not EVER going to change (though it may, of course, be manipulated). And the political environment is bad."

Ian O'Byrne, assistant professor at the College of Charleston, replied, "Human nature will take over as the salacious is often sexier than facts. There are multiple information streams, public and private, that spread this information online. We can also not trust the businesses and industries that develop and facilitate these digital texts and tools to make changes that will significantly improve the situation."

Greg Swanson, media consultant with ITZonTarget, noted, "The sorting of reliable versus fake news requires a trusted referee. It seems unlikely that government can play a meaningful role as this referee. We are too polarized. And we have come to see the television news teams as representing divergent points of view, and, depending on your politics, the network that does not represent your views is guilty of 'fake news.' It is hard to imagine a fair referee that would be universally trusted."

Richard Lachmann, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, replied, "Even though systems [that] flag unreliable information can and will be developed, internet users have to be willing to take advantage of those warnings. Too many Americans will live in political and social subcultures that will champion false information and encourage use of sites that present such false information."

There were also those among these expert respondents who said inequities, perceived and real, are at the root of much of the misinformation being produced.

A professor at MIT observed, "I see this as problem with a socioeconomic cure: Greater equity and justice will achieve much more than a bot war over facts. Controlling 'noise' is less a technological problem than a human problem, a problem of belief, of ideology. Profound levels of ungrounded beliefs about things both sacred and profane existed before the branding of 'fake news.' Belief systems - not 'truths' - help to cement identities, forge relationships, explain the unexplainable."

Julian Sefton-Green, professor of new media education at Deakin University in Australia, said, "The information environment is an extension of social and political tensions. It is impossible to make the information environment a rational, disinterested space; it will always be susceptible to pressure."

A respondent affiliated with Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society wrote, "The democratization of publication and consumption that the networked sphere represents is too expansive for there to be any meaningful improvement possible in terms of controlling or labeling information. People will continue to cosset their own cognitive biases."

Subtheme: In existing economic, political and social systems, the powerful corporate and government leaders most able to improve the information environment profit most when it is in turmoil

A large number of respondents said the interests of the most highly motivated actors, including those in the worlds of business and politics, are generally not motivated to "fix" the proliferation of misinformation. Those players will be a key driver in the worsening of the information environment in the coming years and/or the lack of any serious attempts to effectively mitigate the problem.

Scott Shamp, a dean at Florida State University, commented, "Too many groups gain power through the proliferation of inaccurate or misleading information. When there is value in misinformation, it will rule."

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the World Economic Forum, commented, "We know how to dramatically improve the situation, based on studies of political and similar predictions. What we don't know is how to make it a thriving business. The current [information] models are driven by clickbait, and that is not the foundation of a sustainable economic model."

Stephen Downes, researcher with the National Research Council of Canada, wrote, "Things will not improve. There is too much incentive to spread disinformation, fake news, malware and the rest. Governments and organizations are major actors in this space."

An anonymous respondent said, "Actors can benefit socially, economically, politically by manipulating the information environment. As long as these incentives exist, actors will find a way to exploit them. These benefits are not amenable to technological resolution as they are social, political and cultural in nature. Solving this problem will require larger changes in society."

A number of respondents mentioned market capitalism as a primary obstacle to improving the information environment. A professor based in North America said, "[This] is a capitalist system. The information that will be disseminated will be biased, based on monetary interests."

Seth Finkelstein, consulting programmer and winner of the Electronic Freedom Foundation's Pioneer Award, commented, "Virtually all the structural incentives to spread misinformation seem to be getting worse."

A data scientist based in Europe wrote, "The information environment is built on the top of telecommunication infrastructures and services developed following the free-market ideology, where 'truth' or 'fact' are only useful as long as they can be commodified as market products."

Zbigniew Łukasiak, a business leader based in Europe, wrote, "Big political players have just learned how to play this game. I don't think they will put much effort into eliminating it."

A vice president for public policy at one of the world's foremost entertainment and media companies commented, "The small number of dominant online platforms do not have the skills or ethical center in place to build responsible systems, technical or procedural. They eschew accountability for the impact of their inventions on society and have not developed any of the principles or practices that can deal with the complex issues. They are like biomedical or nuclear technology firms absent any ethics rules or ethics training or philosophy. Worse, their active philosophy is that assessing and responding to likely or potential negative impacts of their inventions is both not theirs to do and even shouldn't be done."

Patricia Aufderheide, professor of communications and founder of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University, said, "Major interests are not invested enough in reliability to create new business models and political and regulatory standards needed for the shift. ... Overall there are powerful forces, including corporate investment in surveillance-based business models, that create many incentives for unreliability, 'invisible handshake' agreements with governments that militate against changing surveillance models, international espionage at a governmental and corporate level in conjunction with mediocre cryptography and poor use of white hat hackers, poor educational standards in major industrial countries such as the U.S., and fundamental weaknesses in the U.S. political/electoral system that encourage exploitation of unreliability. It would be wonderful to believe otherwise, and I hope that other commentators will be able to convince me otherwise."

James Schlaffer, an assistant professor of economics, commented, "Information is curated by people who have taken a step away from the objectivity that was the watchword of journalism. Conflict sells, especially to the opposition party, therefore the opposition news agency will be incentivized to push a narrative and agenda. Any safeguards will appear as a way to further control narrative and propagandize the population."

Subtheme: Human tendencies and infoglut drive people apart and make it harder for them to agree on "common knowledge." That makes healthy debate difficult and destabilizes trust. The fading of news media contributes to the problem

Many respondents expressed concerns about how people's struggles to find and apply accurate information contribute to a larger social and political problem: There is a growing deficit in commonly accepted facts or some sort of cultural "common ground." Why has this happened? They cited several reasons:

Online echo chambers or silos divide people into separate camps, at times even inciting them to express anger and hatred at a volume not seen in previous communications forms.

Information overload crushes people's attention spans. Their coping mechanism is to turn to entertainment or other lighter fare.

High-quality journalism has been decimated due to changes in the attention economy.

They said these factors and others make it difficult for many people in the digital age to create and come to share the type of "common knowledge" that undergirds better and more-responsive public policy. A share of respondents said a lack of commonly shared knowledge leads many in society to doubt the reliability of everything, causing them to simply drop out of civic participation, depleting the number of active and informed citizens.

Jamais Cascio, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, noted, "The power and diversity of very low-cost technologies allowing unsophisticated users to create believable 'alternative facts' is increasing rapidly. It's important to note that the goal of these tools is not necessarily to create consistent and believable alternative facts, but to create plausible levels of doubt in actual facts. The crisis we face about 'truth' and reliable facts is predicated less on the ability to get people to believe the *wrong* thing as it is on the ability to get people to *doubt* the right thing. The success of Donald Trump will be a flaming signal that this strategy works, alongside the variety of technologies now in development (and early deployment) that can exacerbate this problem. In short, it's a successful strategy, made simpler by more powerful information technologies."

Philip J. Nickel, lecturer at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, said, "The decline of traditional news media and the persistence of closed social networks will not change in the next 10 years. These are the main causes of the deterioration of a public domain of shared facts as the basis for discourse and political debate."

Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College, City University of New York, predicted, "Disseminating false rumors and reports will become easier. The proliferation of sources will increase the number of people who don't know who or what they trust. These people will drop out of the normal flow of information. Participation will decline as more and more citizens become unwilling/unable to figure out which information sources are reliable."

What is truth? What is a fact? Who gets to decide? And can most people agree to trust anything as "common knowledge"? A number of respondents challenged the idea that any individuals, groups or technology systems could or should "rate" information as credible, factual, true or not.

An anonymous respondent observed, "Whatever is devised will not be seen as impartial; some things are not black and white; for other situations, facts brought up to come to a conclusion are different that other facts used by others in a situation. Each can have real facts, but it is the facts that are gathered that matter in coming to a conclusion; who will determine what facts will be considered or what is even considered a fact."

A research assistant at MIT noted, "'Fake' and 'true' are not as binary as we would like, and - combined with an increasingly connected and complex digital society - it's a challenge to manage the complexity of social media without prescribing a narrative as 'truth.'"

An internet pioneer and longtime leader at ICANN said, "There is little prospect of a forcing factor that will emerge that will improve the 'truthfulness' of information in the internet."

A vice president for stakeholder engagement said, "Trust networks are best established with physical and unstructured interaction, discussion and observation. Technology is reducing opportunities for such interactions and disrupting human discourse, while giving the 'feeling' that we are communicating more than ever."

Subtheme: A small segment of society will find, use and perhaps pay a premium for information from reliable sources. Outside of this group "chaos will reign" and a worsening digital divide will develop

Some respondents predicted that a larger digital divide will form. Those who pursue more-accurate information and rely on better-informed sources will separate from those who are not selective enough or who do not invest either the time or the money in doing so.

Alejandro Pisanty, a professor at UNAM, the National University of Mexico, and longtime internet policy leader, observed, "Overall, at least a part of society will value trusted information and find ways to keep a set of curated, quality information resources. This will use a combination of organizational and technological tools but above all, will require a sharpened sense of good judgment and access to diverse, including rivalrous, sources. Outside this, chaos will reign."

Alexander Halavais, associate professor of social technologies at Arizona State University, said, "As there is value in accurate information, the availability of such information will continue to grow. However, when consumers are not directly paying for such accuracy, it will certainly mean a greater degree of misinformation in the public sphere. That means the continuing bifurcation of haves and have-nots, when it comes to trusted news and information."

An anonymous editor and publisher commented, "Sadly, many Americans will not pay attention to ANY content from existing or evolving sources. It'll be the continuing dumbing down of the masses, although the 'upper' cadres (educated/thoughtful) will read/see/know, and continue to battle."

An anonymous respondent said, "There will be a sort of 'gold standard' set of sources, and there will be the fringe."

Theme 2: The information environment will not improve because technology will create new challenges that can't or won't be countered effectively and at scale

Many who see little hope for improvement of the information environment said technology will not save society from distortions, half-truths, lies and weaponized narratives. An anonymous business leader argued, "It is too easy to create fake facts, too labor-intensive to check and too easy to fool checking algorithms.'' And this response of an anonymous research scientist based in North America echoed the view of many participants in this canvassing: "We will develop technologies to help identify false and distorted information, BUT they won't be good enough."

Paul N. Edwards, Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University, commented, "Many excellent methods will be developed to improve the information environment, but the history of online systems shows that bad actors can and will always find ways around them."

Vian Bakir, professor in political communication and journalism at Bangor University in Wales, commented, "It won't improve because of 1) the evolving nature of technology - emergent media always catches out those who wish to control it, at least in the initial phase of emergence; 2) online social media and search engine business models favour misinformation spreading; 3) well-resourced propagandists exploit this mix."

Many who expect things will not improve in the next decade said that "white hat" efforts will never keep up with "black hat" advances in information wars. A user-experience and interaction designer said, "As existing channels become more regulated, new unregulated channels will continue to emerge."

Subtheme: Those generally acting for themselves and not the public good have the advantage, and they are likely to stay ahead in the information wars

Many of those who expect no improvement of the information environment said those who wish to spread misinformation are highly motivated to use innovative tricks to stay ahead of the methods meant to stop them. They said certain actors in government, business and other individuals with propaganda agendas are highly driven to make technology work in their favor in the spread of misinformation, and there will continue to be more of them.

A number of respondents referred to this as an "arms race." David Sarokin of Sarokin Consulting and author of "Missed Information," said, "There will be an arms race between reliable and unreliable information." And David Conrad, a chief technology officer, replied, "In the arms race between those who want to falsify information and those who want to produce accurate information, the former will always have an advantage."

Jim Hendler, professor of computing sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, commented, "The information environment will continue to change but the pressures of politics, advertising and stock-return-based capitalism rewards those who find ways to manipulate the system, so it will be a constant battle between those aiming for 'objectiveness' and those trying to manipulate the system."

John Markoff, retired journalist and former technology reporter for The New York Times, said, "I am extremely skeptical about improvements related to verification without a solution to the challenge of anonymity on the internet. I also don't believe there will be a solution to the anonymity problem in the near future."

Scott Spangler, principal data scientist at IBM Watson Health, said technologies now exist that make fake information almost impossible to discern and flag, filter or block. He wrote, "Machine learning and sophisticated statistical techniques will be used to accurately simulate real information content and make fake information almost indistinguishable from the real thing."

Jason Hong, associate professor at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, said, "Some fake information will be detectable and blockable, but the vast majority won't. The problem is that it's *still* very hard for computer systems to analyze text, find assertions made in the text and crosscheck them. There's also the issue of subtle nuances or differences of opinion or interpretation. Lastly, the incentives are all wrong. There are a lot of rich and unethical people, politicians, non-state actors and state actors who are strongly incentivized to get fake information out there to serve their selfish purposes."

A research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University observed, "Defensive innovation is always behind offensive innovation. Those wanting to spread misinformation will always be able to find ways to circumvent whatever controls are put in place."

A research scientist for the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT said, "Problems will get worse faster than solutions can address, but that only means solutions are more needed than ever."

Subtheme: Weaponized narratives and other false content will be magnified by social media, online filter bubbles and AI

Some respondents expect a dramatic rise in the manipulation of the information environment by nation-states, by individual political actors and by groups wishing to spread propaganda. Their purpose is to raise fears that serve their agendas, create or deepen silos and echo chambers, divide people and set them upon each other, and paralyze or confuse public understanding of the political, social and economic landscape.

This has been referred to as the weaponization of public narratives. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and Twitter appear to be prime battlegrounds. Bots are often employed, and AI is expected to be implemented heavily in the information wars to magnify the speed and impact of messaging.

A leading internet pioneer who has worked with the FCC, the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the General Electric Co. (GE) and other major technology organizations commented, "The 'internet-as-weapon' paradigm has emerged."

Dean Willis, consultant for Softarmor Systems, commented, "Governments and political groups have now discovered the power of targeted misinformation coupled to personalized understanding of the targets. Messages can now be tailored with devastating accuracy. We're doomed to living in targeted information bubbles."

An anonymous survey participant noted, "Misinformation will play a major role in conflicts between nations and within competing parties within nation states."

danah boyd, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society, wrote, "What's at stake right now around information is epistemological in nature. Furthermore, information is a source of power and thus a source of contemporary warfare."

Peter Lunenfeld, a professor at UCLA, commented, "For the foreseeable future, the economics of networks and the networks of economics are going to privilege the dissemination of unvetted, unverified and often weaponized information. Where there is a capitalistic incentive to provide content to consumers, and those networks of distribution originate in a huge variety of transnational and even extra-national economies and political systems, the ability to 'control' veracity will be far outstripped by the capability and willingness to supply any kind of content to any kind of user."

These experts noted that the public has turned to social media - especially Facebook - to get its "news." They said the public's craving for quick reads and tabloid-style sensationalism is what makes social media the field of choice for manipulative narratives, which are often packaged to appear like news headlines. They note that the public's move away from more-traditional mainstream news outlets, which had some ethical standards, to consumption of social newsfeeds has weakened mainstream media organizations, making them lower-budget operations that have been forced to compete for attention by offering up clickbait headlines of their own.

An emeritus professor of communication for a U.S. Ivy League university noted, "We have lost an important social function in the press. It is being replaced by social media, where there are few if any moral or ethical guidelines or constraints on the performance of informational roles."

A project leader for a science institute commented, "We live in an era where most people get their 'news' via social media and it is very easy to spread fake news. The existence of clickbait sites make it easy for conspiracy theories to be rapidly spread by people who do not bother to read entire articles, nor look for trusted sources. Given that there is freedom of speech, I wonder how the situation can ever improve. Most users just read the headline, comment and share without digesting the entire article or thinking critically about its content (if they read it at all)."

Subtheme: The most-effective tech solutions to misinformation will endanger people's dwindling privacy options, and they are likely to limit free speech and remove the ability for people to be anonymous online

The rise of new and highly varied voices with differing agendas and motivations might generally be considered to be a good thing. But some of these experts said the recent major successes by misinformation manipulators have created a threatening environment in which many in the public are encouraging platform providers and governments to expand surveillance. Among the technological solutions for "cleaning up" the information environment are those that work to clearly identify entities operating online and employ algorithms to detect misinformation. Some of these experts expect that such systems will act to identify perceived misbehaviors and label, block, filter or remove some online content and even ban some posters from further posting.

An educator commented, "Creating 'a reliable, trusted, unhackable verification system' would produce a system for filtering and hence structuring of content. This will end up being a censored information reality."

An eLearning specialist observed, "Any system deeming itself to have the ability to 'judge' information as valid or invalid is inherently biased." And a professor and researcher noted, "In an open society, there is no prior determination of what information is genuine or fake."

In fact, a share of the respondents predicted that the online information environment will not improve in the next decade because any requirement for authenticated identities would take away the public's highly valued free-speech rights and allow major powers to control the information environment.

A distinguished professor emeritus of political science at a U.S. university wrote, "Misinformation will continue to thrive because of the long (and valuable) tradition of freedom of expression. Censorship will be rejected." An anonymous respondent wrote, "There is always a fight between 'truth' and free speech. But because the internet cannot be regulated free speech will continue to dominate, meaning the information environment will not improve."

But another share of respondents said that is precisely why authenticated identities - which are already operating in some places, including China - will become a larger part of information systems. A professor at a major U.S. university replied, "Surveillance technologies and financial incentives will generate greater surveillance." A retired university professor predicted, "Increased censorship and mass surveillance will tend to create official 'truths' in various parts of the world. In the United States, corporate filtering of information will impose the views of the economic elite."

The executive director of a major global privacy advocacy organization argued removing civil liberties in order to stop misinformation will not be effective, saying, "'Problematic' actors will be able to game the devised systems while others will be over-regulated."

Several other respondents also cited this as a major flaw of this potential remedy. They argued against it for several reasons, including the fact that it enables even broader government and corporate surveillance and control over more of the public.

Emmanuel Edet, head of legal services at the National Information Technology Development Agency of Nigeria, observed, "The information environment will improve but at a cost to privacy."

Bill Woodcock, executive director of the Packet Clearing House, wrote, "There's a fundamental conflict between anonymity and control of public speech, and the countries that don't value anonymous speech domestically are still free to weaponize it internationally, whereas the countries that do value anonymous speech must make it available to all, [or] else fail to uphold their own principle."

James LaRue, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, commented, "Information systems incentivize getting attention. Lying is a powerful way to do that. To stop that requires high surveillance - which means government oversight which has its own incentives not to tell the truth."

Tom Valovic, contributor to The Technoskeptic magazine and author of "Digital Mythologies," said encouraging platforms to exercise algorithmic controls is not optimal. He wrote: "Artificial intelligence that will supplant human judgment is being pursued aggressively by entities in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Algorithmic solutions to replacing human judgment are subject to hidden bias and will ultimately fail to accomplish this goal. They will only continue the centralization of power in a small number of companies that control the flow of information."

Theme 3: The information environment will improve because technology will help label, filter or ban misinformation and thus upgrade the public's ability to judge the quality and veracity of content

Most of the respondents who gave hopeful answers about the future of truth online said they believe technology will be implemented to improve the information environment. They noted their faith was grounded in history, arguing that humans have always found ways to innovate to overcome problems. Most of these experts do not expect there will be a perfect system - but they expect advances. A number said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure of their platforms. They hope this will simultaneously enable the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.

Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) at Stanford University, said, "I am hopeful that the principal digital information platforms will take creative initiatives to privilege more authoritative and credible sources and to call out and demote information sources that appear to be propaganda and manipulation engines, whether human or robotic. In fact, the companies are already beginning to take steps in this direction."

An associate professor at a U.S. university wrote, "I do not see us giving up on seeking truth." And a researcher based in Europe said, "Technologies will appear that solve the trust issues and reward logic."

Adam Lella, senior analyst for marketing insights at comScore Inc., replied, "There have been numerous other industry-related issues in the past (e.g., viewability, invalid traffic detection, cross-platform measurement) that were seemingly impossible to solve, and yet major progress was made in the past few years. If there is a great amount of pressure from the industry to solve this problem (which there is), then methodologies will be developed and progress will be made to help mitigate this issue in the long run. In other words, if there's a will, there's way."

Subtheme: Likely tech-based solutions include adjustments to algorithmic filters, browsers, apps and plug-ins and the implementation of "trust ratings"

Many respondents who hope for improvement in the information environment mentioned ways in which new technological solutions might be implemented.

Bart Knijnenburg, researcher on decision-making and recommender systems and assistant professor of computer science at Clemson University, said, "Two developments will help improve the information environment: 1) News will move to a subscription model (like music, movies, etc.) and subscription providers will have a vested interest in culling down false narratives; 2) Algorithms that filter news will learn to discern the quality of a news item and not just tailor to 'virality' or political leaning."

Laurel Felt, lecturer at the University of Southern California, "There will be mechanisms for flagging suspicious content and providers and then apps and plugins for people to see the 'trust rating' for a piece of content, an outlet or even an IP address. Perhaps people can even install filters so that, when they're doing searches, hits that don't meet a certain trust threshold will not appear on the list."

A longtime U.S. government researcher and administrator in communications and technology sciences said, "The intelligence, defense and related U.S. agencies are very actively working on this problem and results are promising."

Amber Case, research fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, suggested withholding ad revenue until veracity has been established. She wrote, "Right now, there is an incentive to spread fake news. It is profitable to do so, profit made by creating an article that causes enough outrage that advertising money will follow. ... In order to reduce the spread of fake news, we must deincentivize it financially. If an article bursts into collective consciousness and is later proven to be fake, the sites that control or host that content could refuse to distribute advertising revenue to the entity that created or published it. This would require a system of delayed advertising revenue distribution where ad funds are held until the article is proven as accurate or not. A lot of fake news is created by a few people, and removing their incentive could stop much of the news postings."

Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of law at Northeastern University who researches innovation and law, particularly information security, observed, "Software liability law will finally begin to evolve. Market makers will increasingly incorporate security quality as a factor relevant to corporate valuation. The legal climate for security research will continue to improve, as its connection to national security becomes increasingly obvious. These changes will drive significant corporate and public sector improvements in security during the next decade."

Larry Keeley, founder of innovation consultancy Doblin, predicted technology will be improved but people will remain the same, writing, "Capabilities adapted from both bibliometric analytics and good auditing practices will make this a solvable problem. However, non-certified, compelling-but-untrue information will also proliferate. So the new divide will be between the people who want their information to be real vs. those who simply want it to feel important. Remember that quote from Roger Ailes: 'People don't want to BE informed, they want to FEEL informed.' Sigh."
Anonymous survey participants also responded:

"Filters and algorithms will improve to both verify raw data, separate 'overlays' and to correct for a feedback loop."

"Semantic technologies will be able to cross-verify statements, much like meta-analysis."

"The credibility history of each individual will be used to filter incoming information."

"The veracity of information will be linked to how much the source is perceived as trustworthy - we may, for instance, develop a trust index and trust will become more easily verified using artificial-intelligence-driven technologies."

"The work being done on things like verifiable identity and information sharing through loose federation will improve things somewhat (but not completely). That is to say, things will become better but not necessarily good."

"AI, blockchain, crowdsourcing and other technologies will further enhance our ability to filter and qualify the veracity of information."

"There will be new visual cues developed to help news consumers distinguish between trusted news sources and others."

Subtheme: Regulatory remedies could include software liability law, required identities, unbundling of social networks like Facebook

A number of respondents believe there will be policy remedies that move beyond whatever technical innovations emerge in the next decade. They offered a range of suggestions, from regulatory reforms applied to the platforms that aid misinformation merchants to legal penalties applied to wrongdoers. Some think the threat of regulatory reform via government agencies may force the issue of required identities and the abolition of anonymity protections for platform users.

Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, replied, "The 'wild west' state of the internet will not be permitted to continue by those with power, as we are already seeing with increased national pressure on providers/companies by a range of means from law and regulation to moral and consumer pressures."

Willie Currie, a longtime expert in global communications diffusion, wrote, "The apparent success of fake news on platforms like Facebook will have to be dealt with on a regulatory basis as it is clear that technically minded people will only look for technical fixes and may have incentives not to look very hard, so self-regulation is unlikely to succeed. The excuse that the scale of posts on social media platforms makes human intervention impossible will not be a defense. Regulatory options may include unbundling social networks like Facebook into smaller entities. Legal options include reversing the notion that providers of content services over the internet are mere conduits without responsibility for the content. These regulatory and legal options may not be politically possible to affect within the U.S., but they are certainly possible in Europe and elsewhere, especially if fake news is shown to have an impact on European elections."

Sally Wentworth, vice president of global policy development at the Internet Society, warned against too much dependence upon information platform providers in shaping solutions to improve the information environment. She wrote: "It's encouraging to see some of the big platforms beginning to deploy internet solutions to some of the issues around online extremism, violence and fake news. And yet, it feels like as a society, we are outsourcing this function to private entities that exist, ultimately, to make a profit and not necessarily for a social good. How much power are we turning over to them to govern our social discourse? Do we know where that might eventually lead? On the one hand, it's good that the big players are finally stepping up and taking responsibility. But governments, users and society are being too quick to turn all of the responsibility over to internet platforms. Who holds them accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of all of us? Do we even know what those decisions are?"

A professor and chair in a department of educational theory, policy and administration commented, "Some of this work can be done in private markets. Being banned from social media is one obvious one. In terms of criminal law, I think the important thing is to have penalties/regulations be domain-specific. Speech can be regulated in certain venues, but obviously not in all. Federal (and perhaps even international) guidelines would be useful. Without a framework for regulation, I can't imagine penalties."

Theme 4: The information environment will improve, because people will adjust and make things better

Many of those who expect the information environment to improve anticipate that information literacy training and other forms of assistance will help people become more sophisticated consumers. They expect that users will gravitate toward more reliable information - and that knowledge providers will respond in kind.

Frank Kaufmann, founder and director of several international projects for peace activism and media and information, commented, "The quality of news will improve, because things always improve." And Barry Wellman, virtual communities expert and co-director of the NetLab Network, said, "Software and people are becoming more sophisticated."

One hopeful respondent said a change in economic incentives can bring about desired change. Tom Wolzien, chairman of The Video Call Center and Wolzien LLC, said, "The market will not clean up the bad material, but will shift focus and economic rewards toward the reliable. Information consumers, fed up with false narratives, will increasingly shift toward more-trusted sources, resulting in revenue flowing toward those more trusted sources and away from the junk. This does not mean that all people will subscribe to either scientific or journalistic method (or both), but they will gravitate toward material the sources and institutions they find trustworthy, and those institutions will, themselves, demand methods of verification beyond those they use today."

A retired public official and internet pioneer predicted, "1) Education for veracity will become an indispensable element of secondary school. 2) Information providers will become legally responsible for their content. 3) A few trusted sources will continue to dominate the internet."

Irene Wu, adjunct professor of communications, culture and technology at Georgetown University, said, "Information will improve because people will learn better how to deal with masses of digital information. Right now, many people naively believe what they read on social media. When the television became popular, people also believed everything on TV was true. It's how people choose to react and access to information and news that's important, not the mechanisms that distribute them."

Charlie Firestone, executive director at the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, commented, "In the future, tagging, labeling, peer recommendations, new literacies (media, digital) and similar methods will enable people to sift through information better to find and rely on factual information. In addition, there will be a reaction to the prevalence of false information so that people are more willing to act to assure their information will be accurate."

Howard Rheingold, pioneer researcher of virtual communities, longtime professor and author of "Net Smart: How to Thrive Online," noted, "As I wrote in 'Net Smart' in 2012, some combination of education, algorithmic and social systems can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio online - with the caveat that misinformation/disinformation versus verified information is likely to be a continuing arms race. In 2012, Facebook, Google and others had no incentive to pay attention to the problem. After the 2016 election, the issue of fake information has been spotlighted."

Subtheme: Misinformation has always been with us and people have found ways to lessen its impact. The problems will become more manageable as people become more adept at sorting through material

Many respondents agree that misinformation will persist as the online realm expands and more people are connected in more ways. Still, the more hopeful among these experts argue that progress is inevitable as people and organizations find coping mechanisms. They say history validates this. Furthermore, they said technologists will play an important role in helping filter out misinformation and modeling new digital literacy practices for users.

Mark Bunting, visiting academic at Oxford Internet Institute, a senior digital strategy and public policy advisor with 16 years of experience at the BBC and as a digital consultant, wrote, "Our information environment has been immeasurably improved by the democratisation of the means of publication since the creation of the web nearly 25 years ago. We are now seeing the downsides of that transformation, with bad actors manipulating the new freedoms for antisocial purposes, but techniques for managing and mitigating those harms will improve, creating potential for freer, but well-governed, information environments in the 2020s."

Jonathan Grudin, principal design researcher at Microsoft, said, "We were in this position before, when printing presses broke the existing system of information management. A new system emerged and I believe we have the motivation and capability to do it again. It will again involve information channeling more than misinformation suppression; contradictory claims have always existed in print, but have been manageable and often healthy."

Judith Donath, fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, wrote, "'Fake news' is not new. The Weekly World News had a circulation of over a million for its mostly fictional news stories that are printed and sold in a format closely resembling a newspaper. Many readers recognized it as entertainment, but not all. More subtly, its presence on the newsstand reminded everyone that anything can be printed."

Joshua Hatch, president of the Online News Association, noted, "I'm slightly optimistic because there are more people who care about doing the right thing than there are people who are trying to ruin the system. Things will improve because people - individually and collectively - will make it so."

Many of these respondents said the leaders and engineers of the major information platform companies will play a significant role. Some said they expect some other systematic and social changes will alter things.

John Wilbanks, chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks, replied, "I'm an optimist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think as people born into the internet age move into positions of authority they'll be better able to distill and discern fake news than those of us who remember an age of trusted gatekeepers. They'll be part of the immune system. It's not that the environment will get better, it's that those younger will be better fitted to survive it."

Danny Rogers, founder and CEO of Terbium Labs, replied, "Things always improve. Not monotonically, and not without effort, but fundamentally, I still believe that the efforts to improve the information environment will ultimately outweigh efforts to devolve it."

Bryan Alexander, futurist and president of Bryan Alexander Consulting, replied, "Growing digital literacy and the use of automated systems will tip the balance towards a better information environment."

A number of these respondents said information platform corporations such as Google and Facebook will begin to efficiently police the environment through various technological enhancements. They expressed faith in the inventiveness of these organizations and suggested the people of these companies will implement technology to embed moral and ethical thinking in the structure and business practices of their platforms, enabling the screening of content while still protecting rights such as free speech.

Patrick Lambe, principal consultant at Straits Knowledge, commented, "All largescale human systems are adaptive. When faced with novel predatory phenomena, counter-forces emerge to balance or defeat them. We are at the beginning of a largescale negative impact from the undermining of a social sense of reliable fact. Counter-forces are already emerging. The presence of largescale 'landlords' controlling significant sections of the ecosystem (e.g., Google, Facebook) aids in this counter-response."

A professor in technology law at a West-Coast-based U.S. university said, "Intermediaries such as Facebook and Google will develop more-robust systems to reward legitimate producers and punish purveyors of fake news."

A longtime director for Google commented, "Companies like Google and Facebook are investing heavily in coming up with usable solutions. Like email spam, this problem can never entirely be eliminated, but it can be managed."

Sandro Hawke, technical staff at the World Wide Web Consortium, predicted, "Things are going to get worse before they get better, but humans have the basic tools to solve this problem, so chances are good that we will. The biggest risk, as with many things, is that narrow self-interest stops people from effectively collaborating."
Anonymous respondents shared these remarks:

"Accurate facts are essential, particularly within a democracy, so this will be a high, shared value worthy of investment and government support, as well as private-sector initiatives."

"We are only at the beginning of drastic technological and societal changes. We will learn and develop strategies to deal with problems like fake news."

"There is a long record of innovation taking place to solve problems. Yes, sometimes innovation leads to abuses, but further innovation tends to solve those problems."

Consumers have risen up in the past to block the bullshit, fake ads, fake investment scams, etc., and they will again with regard to fake news."

"As we understand more about digital misinformation we will design better tools, policies and opportunities for collective action."

"Now that it is on the agenda, smart researchers and technologists will develop solutions."

"The increased awareness of the issue will lead to/force new solutions and regulation that will improve the situation in the long-term even if there are bound to be missteps such as flawed regulation and solutions along the way."

Subtheme: Crowdsourcing will work to highlight verified facts and block those who propagate lies and propaganda. Some also have hopes for distributed ledgers (blockchain)

A number of these experts said solutions such as tagging, flagging or other labeling of questionable content will continue to expand and be of further use in the future in tackling the propagation of misinformation

J. Nathan Matias, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and previously a visiting scholar at MIT's Center for Civic Media, wrote, "Through ethnography and largescale social experiments, I have been encouraged to see volunteer communities with tens of millions of people work together to successfully manage the risks from inaccurate news."

A researcher of online harassment working for a major internet information platform commented, "If there are nonprofits keeping technology in line, such as an ACLU-esque initiative, to monitor misinformation and then partner with spaces like Facebook to deal with this kind of news spam, then yes, the information environment will improve. We also need to move away from clickbaity-like articles, and not algorithmically rely on popularity but on information."

An engineer based in North America replied, "The future will attach credibility to the source of any information. The more a given source is attributed to 'fake news,' the lower it will sit in the credibility tree."

Micah Altman, director of research for the Program on Information Science at MIT, commented, "Technological advances are creating forces pulling in two directions: It is increasingly easy to create real-looking fake information; and it is increasingly easy to crowdsource the collection and verification of information. In the longer term, I'm optimistic that the second force will dominate - as transaction cost-reduction appears to be relatively in favor of crowds versus concentrated institutions."

A past chairman of a major U.S. scientific think tank and former CEO replied, "[The information environment] should improve because there are many techniques that can be brought to bear both human-mediated - such as collective intelligence via user voting and rating - and technological responses that are either very early in their evolution or not or not deployed at all. See spam as an analog."

Some predicted that digital distributed ledger technologies, known as blockchain, may provide some answers. A longtime technology editor and columnist based in Europe, commented, "The blockchain approach used for Bitcoin, etc., could be used to distribute content. DECENT is an early example." And an anonymous respondent from Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said, "They will be cryptographically verified, with concepts."

But others were less confident that blockchain will work. A leading researcher studying the spread of misinformation observed, "I know systems like blockchain are a start, but in some ways analog systems (e.g., scanned voting ballots) can be more resilient to outside influence than digital solutions such as increased encryption. There are always potential compromises when our communication networks are based on human-coded technology and hardware; this [is] less the case with analog-first, digital-second systems."

A professor of media and communication based in Europe said, "Right now, reliable and trusted verification systems are not yet available; they may become technically available in the future but the arms race between corporations and hackers is never ending. Blockchain technology may be an option, but every technological system needs to be built on trust, and as long as there is no globally governed trust system that is open and transparent, there will be no reliable verification systems."

Theme 5: Tech can't win the battle. The public must fund and support the production of objective, accurate information. It must also elevate information literacy to be a primary goal of education

There was common agreement among many respondents - whether they said they expect to see improvements in the information environment in the next decade or not - that the problem of misinformation requires significant attention. A share of these respondents urged action in two areas: A bolstering of the public-serving press and an expansive, comprehensive, ongoing information literacy education effort for people of all ages.

A sociologist doing research on technology and civic engagement at MIT said, "Though likely to get worse before it gets better, the 2016-2017 information ecosystem problems represent a watershed moment and call to action for citizens, policymakers, journalists, designers and philanthropists who must work together to address the issues at the heart of misinformation."

Michael Zimmer, associate professor and privacy and information ethics scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee commented, "This is a social problem that cannot be solved via technology."

Subtheme: Funding and support must be directed to the restoration of a well-fortified, ethical and trusted public press

Many respondents noted that while the digital age has amplified countless information sources it has hurt the reach and influence of the traditional news organizations. These are the bedrock institutions much of the public has relied upon for objective, verified, reliable information - information undergirded by ethical standards and a general goal of serving the common good. These respondents said the information environment can't be improved without more, well-staffed, financially stable, independent news organizations. They believe that material can rise above misinformation and create a base of "common knowledge" the public can share and act on.

Susan Hares, a pioneer with the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) and longtime internet engineering strategist, now a consultant, said, "Society simply needs to decide that the 'press' no longer provides unbiased information, and it must pay for unbiased and verified information."

Christopher Jencks, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, said, "Reducing 'fake news' requires a profession whose members share a commitment to getting it right. That, in turn, requires a source of money to pay such professional journalists. Advertising used to provide newspapers with money to pay such people. That money is drying up, and it seems unlikely to be replaced within the next decade."

Rich Ling, professor of media technology at the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, said, "We have seen the consequences of fake news in the U.S. presidential election and Brexit. This is a wake-up call to the news industry, policy makers and journalists to refine the system of news production."

Maja Vujovic, senior copywriter for the Comtrade Group, predicted, "The information environment will be increasingly perceived as a public good, making its reliability a universal need. Technological advancements and civil-awareness efforts will yield varied ways to continuously purge misinformation from it, to keep it reasonably reliable."

An author and journalist based in North America said, "I believe this era could spawn a new one - a flight to quality in which time-starved citizens place high value on verified news sources."

A professor of law at a major U.S. state university commented, "Things won't get better until we realize that accurate news and information are a public good that require not-for-profit leadership and public subsidy."

Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote, "The problem with online news is structural: There are too few gatekeepers, and the internet business model does not sustain quality journalism. The reason is simply that advertising revenue has been untethered from news production."

With precarious funding and shrinking audiences, healthy journalism that serves the common good is losing its voice. Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, wrote, "There are no technological solutions that correct for the dominance of Facebook and Google in our lives. These incumbents are locked into monopoly power over our information ecosystem and as they drain advertising money from all other low-cost commercial media they impoverish the public sphere."

Subtheme: Elevate information literacy: It must become a primary goal at all levels of education

Many of these experts said the flaws in human nature and still-undeveloped norms in the digital age are the key problems that make users susceptible to false, misleading and manipulative online narratives. One potential remedy these respondents suggested is a massive compulsory crusade to educate all in digital-age information literacy. Such an effort, some said, might prepare more people to be wise in what they view/read/believe and possibly even serve to upgrade the overall social norms of information sharing.

Karen Mossberger, professor and director of the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, wrote, "The spread of fake news is not merely a problem of bots, but part of a larger problem of whether or not people exercise critical thinking and information-literacy skills. Perhaps the surge of fake news in the recent past will serve as a wake-up call to address these aspects of online skills in the media and to address these as fundamental educational competencies in our education system. Online information more generally has an almost limitless diversity of sources, with varied credibility. Technology is driving this issue, but the fix isn't a technical one alone."

Mike DeVito, graduate researcher at Northwestern University, wrote, "These are not technical problems; they are human problems that technology has simply helped scale, yet we keep attempting purely technological solutions. We can't machine-learn our way out of this disaster, which is actually a perfect storm of poor civics knowledge and poor information literacy."

Miguel Alcaine, International Telecommunication Union area representative for Central America, commented, "The boundaries between online and offline will continue to blur. We understand online and offline are different modalities of real life. There is and will be a market (public and private providers) for trusted information. There is and will be space for misinformation. The most important action societies can take to protect people is education, information and training."

An early internet developer and security consultant commented, "Fake news is not a product of a flaw in the communications channel and cannot be fixed by a fix to the channel. It is due to a flaw in the human consumers of information and can be repaired only by education of those consumers."

An anonymous respondent from the Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society noted, "False information - intentionally or inadvertently so - is neither new nor the result of new technologies. It may now be easier to spread to more people more quickly, but the responsibility for sifting facts from fiction has always sat with the person receiving that information and always will."

An internet pioneer and rights activist based in the Asia/Pacific region said, "We as a society are not investing enough in education worldwide. The environment will only improve if both sides of the communication channel are responsible. The reader and the producer of content, both have responsibilities."

Deirdre Williams, retired internet activist, replied, "Human beings are losing their capability to question and to refuse. Young people are growing into a world where those skills are not being taught."

Julia Koller, a learning solutions lead developer, replied, "Information is only as reliable as the people who are receiving it. If readers do not change or improve their ability to seek out and identify reliable information sources, the information environment will not improve."

Ella Taylor-Smith, senior research fellow at the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University, noted, "As more people become more educated, especially as digital literacy becomes a popular and respected skill, people will favour (and even produce) better quality information."

Constance Kampf, a researcher in computer science and mathematics, said, "The answer depends on socio-technical design - these trends of misinformation versus verifiable information were already present before the internet, and they are currently being amplified. The state and trends in education and place of critical thinking in curricula across the world will be the place to look to see whether or not the information environment will improve - cyberliteracy relies on basic information literacy, social literacy and technological literacy. For the environment to improve, we need substantial improvements in education systems across the world in relation to critical thinking, social literacy, information literacy, and cyberliteracy (see Laura Gurak's book ' Cyberliteracy ')."

Su Sonia Herring, an editor and translator, commented, "Misinformation and fake news will exist as long as humans do; they have existed ever since language was invented. Relying on algorithms and automated measures will result in various unwanted consequences. Unless we equip people with media literacy and critical-thinking skills, the spread of misinformation will prevail."

Responses from additional key experts regarding the future of the information environment

This section features responses by several of the top analysts who participated in this canvassing. Following this wide-ranging set of comments is a much more expansive set of quotations directly tied to the five primary themes identified in this report.

Ignorance breeds frustration and 'a growing fraction of the population has neither the skills nor the native intelligence to master growing complexity'

Mike Roberts, pioneer leader at ICANN and Internet Hall of Fame member, replied, "There are complex forces working both to improve the quality of information on the net, and to corrupt it. I believe the outrage resulting from recent events will, on balance, lead to a net improvement, but viewed with hindsight, the improvement may be viewed as inadequate. The other side of the complexity coin is ignorance. The average man or woman in America today has less knowledge of the underpinnings of his or her daily life than they did 50 or a hundred years ago. There has been a tremendous insertion of complex systems into many aspects of how we live in the decades since World War II, fueled by a tremendous growth in knowledge in general. Even among highly intelligent people, there is a significant growth in personal specialization in order to trim the boundaries of expected expertise to manageable levels. Among educated people, we have learned mechanisms for coping with complexity. We use what we know of statistics and probability to compartment uncertainty. We adopt 'most likely' scenarios for events of which we do not have detailed knowledge, and so on. A growing fraction of the population has neither the skills nor the native intelligence to master growing complexity, and in a competitive social environment, obligations to help our fellow humans go unmet. Educated or not, no one wants to be a dummy - all the wrong connotations. So ignorance breeds frustration, which breeds acting out, which breeds antisocial and pathological behavior, such as the disinformation, which was the subject of the survey, and many other undesirable second order effects. Issues of trustable information are certainly important, especially since the technological intelligentsia command a number of tools to combat untrustable info. But the underlying pathology won't be tamed through technology alone. We need to replace ignorance and frustration with better life opportunities that restore confidence - a tall order and a tough agenda. Is there an immediate nexus between widespread ignorance and corrupted information sources? Yes, of course. In fact, there is a virtuous circle where acquisition of trustable information reduces ignorance, which leads to better use of better information, etc."

The truth of news is murky and multifaceted

Judith Donath, fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, wrote, "Yes, trusted methods will emerge to block false narratives and allow accurate information to prevail, and, yes, the quality and veracity of information online will deteriorate due to the spread of unreliable, sometimes even dangerous, socially destabilizing ideas. Of course, the definition of 'true' is sometimes murky. Experimental scientists have many careful protocols in place to assure the veracity of their work, and the questions they ask have well-defined answers - and still there can be controversy about what is true, what work was free from outside influence. The truth of news stories is far murkier and multi-faceted. A story can be distorted, disproportional, meant to mislead - and still, strictly speaking, factually accurate. ... But a pernicious harm of fake news is the doubt it sows about the reliability of all news. Donald Trump's repeated 'fake news' smears of The New York Times, Washington Post, etc., are among his most destructive non-truths."

"Algorithms weaponize rhetoric," influencing on a mass scale

Susan Etlinger, industry analyst at Altimeter Research, said, "There are two main dynamics at play: One is the increasing sophistication and availability of machine learning algorithms and the other is human nature. We've known since the ancient Greeks and Romans that people are easily persuaded by rhetoric; that hasn't changed much in two thousand years. Algorithms weaponize rhetoric, making it easier and faster to influence people on a mass scale. There are many people working on ways to protect the integrity and reliability of information, just as there are cybersecurity experts who are in a constant arms race with cybercriminals, but to put as much emphasis on 'information' (a public good) as 'data' (a personal asset) will require a pretty big cultural shift. I suspect this will play out differently in different parts of the world."

There's no technical solution for the fact that 'news' is a social bargain

Clay Shirky, vice provost for educational technology at New York University, replied, "'News' is not a stable category - it is a social bargain. There's no technical solution for designing a system that prevents people from asserting that Obama is a Muslim but allows them to assert that Jesus loves you."

'Strong economic forces are incentivizing the creation and spread of fake news'

Amy Webb, author and founder of the Future Today Institute, wrote, "In an era of social, democratized media, we've adopted a strange attitude. We're simultaneously skeptics and true believers. If a news story reaffirms what we already believe, it's credible - but if it rails against our beliefs, it's fake. We apply that same logic to experts and sources quoted in stories. With our limbic systems continuously engaged, we're more likely to pay attention to stories that make us want to fight, take flight or fill our social media accounts with links. As a result, there are strong economic forces incentivizing the creation and spread of fake news. In the digital realm, attention is currency. It's good for democracy to stop the spread of misinformation, but it's bad for business. Unless significant measures are taken in the present - and unless all the companies in our digital information ecosystem use strategic foresight to map out the future - I don't see how fake news could possibly be reduced by 2027."

Propagandists exploit whatever communications channels are available

Ian Peter, internet pioneer, historian and activist, observed, "It is not in the interests of either the media or the internet giants who propagate information, nor of governments, to create a climate in which information cannot be manipulated for political, social or economic gain. Propaganda and the desire to distort truth for political and other ends have always been with us and will adapt to any form of new media which allows open communication and information flows."

Expanding information outlets erode opportunities for a 'common narrative'

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote, "Over time, the general trend is that a proliferation of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has led to a proliferation of opportunities for different viewpoints and perspectives, which has eroded the degree to which there is a common narrative - indeed, in some ways, this parallels a trend away from monarchy toward more democratic societies that welcome a diversity of perspectives - so I anticipate the range of perspectives to increase, rather than decrease, and for these perspectives to include not only opinions but also facts, which are inherently reductionist and can easily be manipulated to suit the perspective of the author, following the old aphorism about statistics Mark Twain attributed to Benjamin Disraeli ['There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.'], which originally referred to experts more generally."

'Broken as it might be, the internet is still capable of routing around damage'

Paul Saffo, longtime Silicon-Valley-based technology forecaster, commented, "The information crisis happened in the shadows. Now that the issue is visible as a clear and urgent danger, activists and people who see a business opportunity will begin to focus on it. Broken as it might be, the internet is still capable of routing around damage."

It will be impossible to distinguish between fake and real video, audio, photos

Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, predicted, "It's not going to be better or worse but very different. Already we are developing technologies that make it impossible to distinguish between fake and real video, fake and real photographs, etc. We will have to evolve new tools for authentication and verification. We will probably have to evolve both new social norms as well as regulatory mechanisms if we want to maintain online environment as a source of information that many people can rely on."

A 'Cambrian explosion' of techniques will arise to monitor the web and non-web sources

Stowe Boyd, futurist, publisher and editor-in-chief of Work Futures, said, "The rapid rise of AI will lead to a Cambrian explosion of techniques to monitor the web and non-web media sources and social networks and rapidly identifying and tagging fake and misleading content."

Well, there's good news and bad news about the information future ...

Jeff Jarvis, professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, commented, "Reasons for hope: Much attention is being directed at manipulation and disinformation; the platforms may begin to recognize and favor quality; and we are still at the early stage of negotiating norms and mores around responsible civil conversation. Reasons for pessimism: Imploding trust in institutions; institutions that do not recognize the need to radically change to regain trust; and business models that favor volume over value."

A fear of the imposition of pervasive censorship

Jim Warren, an internet pioneer and open-government/open-records/open-meetings advocate, said, "False and misleading information has always been part of all cultures (gossip, tabloids, etc.). Teaching judgment has always been the solution, and it always will be. I (still) trust the longstanding principle of free speech: The best cure for 'offensive' speech is MORE speech. The only major fear I have is of massive communications conglomerates imposing pervasive censorship."

People have to take responsibility for finding reliable sources

Steven Miller, vice provost for research at Singapore Management University, wrote, "Even now, if one wants to find reliable sources, one has no problem doing that, so we do not lack reliable sources of news today. It is that there are all these other options, and people can choose to live in worlds where they ignore so-called reliable sources, or ignore a multiplicity of sources that can be compared, and focus on what they want to believe. That type of situation will continue. Five or 10 years from now, I expect there to continue to be many reliable sources of news, and a multiplicity of sources. Those who want to seek out reliable sources will have no problems doing so. Those who want to make sure they are getting a multiplicity of sources to see the range of inputs, and to sort through various types of inputs, will be able to do so, but I also expect that those who want to be in the game of influencing perceptions of reality and changing the perceptions of reality will also have ample means to do so. So the responsibility is with the person who is seeking the news and trying to get information on what is going on. We need more individuals who take responsibility for getting reliable sources."

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The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online

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Experts are split on whether the coming years will see less misinformation online. Those who foresee improvement hope for technological and societal solutions. Others say bad actors using technology can exploit human vulnerabilities.

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These articles discuss teens and the percentage of those that use technology and the internet each day.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the share of teens who use Facebook has fallen sharply

The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey. Some 67% of teens say they ever use TikTok, with 16% of all teens saying they use it almost constantly. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center's 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center's new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens. After those platforms come Facebook with 32% and smaller shares who use Twitter, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit and Tumblr.

Changes in the social media landscape since 2014-15 extend beyond TikTok's rise and Facebook's fall. Growing shares of teens say they are using Instagram and Snapchat since then. Conversely, Twitter and Tumblr saw declining shares of teens who report using their platforms. And two of the platforms the Center tracked in the earlier survey - Vine and Google+ - no longer exist.

There are some notable demographic differences in teens' social media choices. For example, teen boys are more likely than teen girls to say they use YouTube, Twitch and Reddit, whereas teen girls are more likely than teen boys to use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. In addition, higher shares of Black and Hispanic teens report using TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp compared with White teens.

This study also explores the frequency with which teens are on each of the top five online platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Fully 35% of teens say they are using at least one of them "almost constantly." Teen TikTok and Snapchat users are particularly engaged with these platforms, followed by teen YouTube users in close pursuit. A quarter of teens who use Snapchat or TikTok say they use these apps almost constantly, and a fifth of teen YouTube users say the same. When looking at teens overall, 19% say they use YouTube almost constantly, 16% say this about TikTok, and 15% about Snapchat.

When reflecting on the amount of time they spend on social media generally, a majority of U.S. teens (55%) say they spend about the right amount of time on these apps and sites, while about a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Just 8% of teens think they spend too little time on these platforms.

Asked about the idea of giving up social media, 54% of teens say it would be at least somewhat hard to give it up, while 46% say it would be at least somewhat easy. Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to express it would be difficult to give up social media (58% vs. 49%). Conversely, a quarter of teen boys say giving up social media would be very easy, while 15% of teen girls say the same. Older teens also say they would have difficulty giving up social media. About six-in-ten teens ages 15 to 17 (58%) say giving up social media would be at least somewhat difficult to do. A smaller share of 13- to 14-year-olds (48%) think this would be difficult.

Beyond just online platforms, the new survey finds that the vast majority of teens have access to digital devices, such as smartphones (95%), desktop or laptop computers (90%) and gaming consoles (80%). And the study shows there has been an uptick in daily teen internet users, from 92% in 2014-15 to 97% today. In addition, the share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has roughly doubled since 2014-15 (46% now and 24% then).

These are some of the findings from an online survey of 1,316 teens conducted by the Pew Research Center from April 14 to May 4, 2022. More details about the findings on adoption and use of digital technologies by teens are covered below.

Smartphones, desktop and laptop computers, and gaming consoles remain widely accessible to teens

Since 2014-15, there has been a 22 percentage point rise in the share of teens who report having access to a smartphone (95% now and 73% then). While teens' access to smartphones has increased over roughly the past eight years, their access to other digital technologies, such as desktop or laptop computers or gaming consoles, has remained statistically unchanged.

The survey shows there are differences in access to these digital devices for certain groups. For instance, teens ages 15 to 17 (98%) are more likely to have access to a smartphone than their 13- to 14-year-old counterparts (91%). In addition, teen boys are 21 points more likely to say they have access to gaming consoles than teen girls - a pattern that has been reported in prior Center research.

Access to computers and gaming consoles also differs by teens' household income. U.S. teens living in households that make $75,000 or more annually are 12 points more likely to have access to gaming consoles and 15 points more likely to have access to a desktop or laptop computer than teens from households with incomes under $30,000. These gaps in teen computer and gaming console access are consistent with digital divides by household income the Center has observed in previous teen surveys.

While 72% of U.S. teens say they have access to a smartphone, a computer and a gaming console at home, more affluent teens are particularly likely to have access to all three devices. Fully 76% of teens that live in households that make at least $75,000 a year say they have or have access to a smartphone, a gaming console and a desktop or laptop computer, compared with smaller shares of teens from households that make less than $30,000 or teens from households making $30,000 to $74,999 a year who say they have access to all three (60% and 69% of teens, respectively).

Almost all U.S. teens report using the internet daily

The share of teens who say they use the internet about once a day or more has grown slightly since 2014-15. Today, 97% of teens say they use the internet daily, compared with 92% of teens in 2014-15 who said the same.

In addition, the share of teens who say they use the internet almost constantly has gone up: 46% of teens say they use the internet almost constantly, up from only about a quarter (24%) of teenagers who said the same in 2014-15.

Black and Hispanic teens stand out for being on the internet more frequently than White teens. Some 56% of Black teens and 55% of Hispanic teens say they are online almost constantly, compared with 37% of White teens. The difference between Hispanic and White teens on this measure is consistent with previous findings when it comes to frequent internet use.

In addition, older teens are more likely to be online almost constantly. Some 52% of 15- to 17-year-olds say they use the internet almost constantly, while 36% of 13- to 14-year-olds say the same. Another demographic pattern in "almost constant" internet use: 53% of urban teens report being online almost constantly, while somewhat smaller shares of suburban and rural teens say the same (44% and 43%, respectively).

Slight differences are seen among those who say they engage in "almost constant" internet use based on household income. A slightly larger share of teens from households making $30,000 to $74,999 annually report using the internet almost constantly, compared with teens from homes making at least $75,000 (51% and 43%, respectively). Teens who live in households making under $30,000 do not significantly differ from either group.

This survey asked whether U.S. teens use 10 specific online platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit and Tumblr.

YouTube stands out as the most common online platform teens use out of the platforms measured, with 95% saying they ever use this site or app. Majorities also say they use TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%). Instagram and Snapchat use has grown since asked about in 2014-15, when roughly half of teens said they used Instagram (52%) and about four-in-ten said they used Snapchat (41%).

The share of teens using Facebook has declined sharply in the past decade. Today, 32% of teens report ever using Facebook, down 39 points since 2014-15, when 71% said they ever used the platform. Although today's teens do not use Facebook as extensively as teens in previous years, the platform still enjoys widespread usage among adults, as seen in other recent Center studies.

Other social media platforms have also seen decreases in usage among teens since 2014-15. Some 23% of teens now say they ever use Twitter, compared with 33% in 2014-15. Tumblr has seen a similar decline. While 14% of teens in 2014-15 reported using Tumblr, just 5% of teens today say they use this platform.

The online platforms teens flock to differ slightly based on gender. Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to say they ever use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, while boys are more likely to use Twitch and Reddit. Boys also report using YouTube at higher rates than girls, although the vast majority of teens use this platform regardless of gender.

Teens' use of certain online platforms also differs by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than White teens to say they ever use TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or WhatsApp. Black teens also stand out for being more likely to use TikTok compared with Hispanic teens, while Hispanic teens are more likely than their peers to use WhatsApp.

Older teens are more likely than younger teens to say they use each of the online platforms asked about except for YouTube and WhatsApp. Instagram is an especially notable example, with a majority of teens ages 15 to 17 (73%) saying they ever use Instagram, compared with 45% of teens ages 13 to 14 who say the same (a 28-point gap).

Despite Facebook losing its dominance in the social media world with this new cohort of teens, higher shares of those living in lower- and middle-income households gravitate toward Facebook than their peers who live in more affluent households: 44% of teens living in households earning less than $30,000 a year and 39% of teens from households earning $30,000 to less than $75,000 a year say they ever use Facebook, while 27% of those from households earning $75,000 or more a year say the same. Differences in Facebook use by household income were found in previous Center surveys as well (however the differences by household income were more pronounced in the past).

When it comes to the frequency that teens use the top five platforms the survey looked at, YouTube and TikTok stand out as the platforms teens use most frequently. About three-quarters of teens visit YouTube at least daily, including 19% who report using the site or app almost constantly. A majority of teens (58%) visit TikTok daily, while about half say the same for Snapchat (51%) and Instagram (50%).

Looking within teens who use a given platform, TikTok and Snapchat stand out for having larger shares of teenage users who visit these platforms regularly. Fully 86% of teen TikTok or Snapchat users say they are on that platform daily and a quarter of teen users for both of these platforms say they are on the site or app almost constantly. Somewhat smaller shares of teen YouTube users (20%) and teen Instagram users (16%) say they are on those respective platforms almost constantly (about eight-in-ten teen users are on these platforms daily).

Not only is there a smaller share of teenage Facebook users than there was in 2014-15, teens who do use Facebook are also relatively less frequent users of the platform compared with the other platforms covered in this survey. Just 7% of teen Facebook users say they are on the site or app almost constantly (representing 2% of all teens). Still, about six-in-ten teen Facebook users (57%) visit the platform daily.

Across these five platforms, 35% of all U.S. teens say they are on at least one of them almost constantly. While this is not a comprehensive rundown of all teens who use any kind of online platform almost constantly, this 35% of teens represent a group of relatively heavy platform users and they clearly have different views about their use of social media compared with those who say they use at least one of these platforms, though less often than "almost constantly." Those findings are covered in a later section.

Larger shares of Black and Hispanic teens say they are on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram almost constantly than White teens. For example, Black and Hispanic teens are roughly five times more likely than White teens to say they are on Instagram almost constantly.

Hispanic teens are more likely to be frequent users of Snapchat than White or Black teens: 23% of Hispanic teens say they use this social media platform almost constantly, while 12% of White teens and 11% of Black teens say the same. There are no racial and ethnic differences in teens' frequency of Facebook usage.

Overall, Hispanic (47%) and Black teens (45%) are more likely than White teens (26%) to say they use at least one of these five online platforms almost constantly.

As social media use has become a common part of many teens' daily routine, the Center asked U.S. teens how they feel about the amount of time they are spending on social media. A slight majority (55%) say the amount of time they spend of social media is about right, and smaller shares say they spend too much time or too little time on these platforms.

While a majority of teen boys and half of teen girls say they spend about the right amount of time on social media, this sentiment is more common among boys. Teen girls are more likely than their male counterparts to say they spend too much time on social media. In addition, White teens are more likely to see their time using social media as about right compared with Hispanic teens. Black teens do not differ from either group.

This analysis also explored how teens who frequently use these platforms may feel about their time on them and how those feelings may differ from teens who use these sites and apps less frequently. To do this, two groups were constructed. The first group is the 35% of teens who say they use at least one of the five platforms this survey covered - YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook - almost constantly. The other group consists of teens who say they use these platforms but not as frequently - that is, they use at least one of these five platforms but use them less often than "almost constantly."

When asked how they feel about the time they spend on social media, 53% of teens who almost constantly use at least one of the platforms say they are on social media too much, while about three-in-ten teens (28%) who use at least one of these platforms but less often say the same.

Teens who are almost constantly online - not just on social media - also stand out for saying they spend too much time on social media: 51% say they are on social media too much. By comparison, 26% of teens who are online several times a day say they are on social media too much.

When reflecting on what it would be like to try to quit social media, teens are somewhat divided whether this would be easy or difficult. Some 54% of U.S. teens say it would be very (18%) or somewhat hard (35%) for them to give up social media. Conversely, 46% of teens say it would be at least somewhat easy for them to give up social media, with a fifth saying it would be very easy.

Teenage girls are slightly more likely to say it would be hard to give up social media than teen boys (58% vs. 49%). A similar gap is seen between older and younger teens, with teens 15 to 17 years old being more likely than 13- and 14-year-olds to say it would be at least somewhat hard to give up social media.

A majority of teens who use at least one of the platforms asked about in the survey "almost constantly" say it would be hard to give up social media, with 32% saying it would be very hard. Smaller shares of teens who use at least one of these online platforms but use them less often say the same.

The teens who think they spend too much time on social media also report they would struggle to step back completely from it. Teens who say they spend too much time on social media are 36 percentage points more likely than teens who see their usage as about right to say giving up social media would be hard (78% vs. 42%). In fact, about three-in-ten teens who say they use social media too much (29%) say it would be very hard for them to give up social media. Conversely, a majority of teens who see their social media usage as about right (58%) say that it would be at least somewhat easy for them to give it up.

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Emily A. Vogels, Risa Gelles-Watnick and Navid Massarat

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The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds that TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S.

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Nearly half of US teens say they use the internet "almost constantly," according to a new survey released on Wednesday.

The survey of 1,316 teenagers delved into the technology habits of teens and was conducted by the Pew Research Center.

The percentage of teens who reported a near constant level of online presence was markedly up from a 2015 Pew survey in which only about a quarter of teens reported that level of internet use.

The survey found that the social media platforms most frequently used by teens are changing as well, with video-focused platforms like YouTube and TikTok leading in popularity.

Facebook is no longer such a dominant force in the lives of American teens, according to the new survey. Only 32% of US teens ages 13 to 17 say they now use Facebook. That's down from the 71% of teens who said they used Facebook in a Pew survey conducted between 2014 and 2015.

Once the most popular social media platform for younger users by a long shot, Facebook has now been surpassed by YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to Pew.

YouTube, in particular, was used by 95% of teens, according to the survey, with nearly 20% reporting near constant use of the platform, making it the most popular social network, followed by TikTok. Of teens who used TikTok, nearly a quarter reported near constant use.

In recent years, Facebook and Instagram have taken steps to beat back competition from newer platforms. (Notably, teens were nearly twice as likely to be Instagram users than to be Facebook users.) Both platforms released features that replicate Snapchat's signature Stories feature, which lets users post content that disappears after 24 hours. Instagram also introduced a short-form video option called Reels to compete with TikTok.

In some cases, however, those efforts have created new headaches for the company. Many Instagram users, including celebrities Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, recently criticized some of Instagram's updates for making the platform too much like TikTok. Instagram has since walked back some of its changes.

Meta (META), the parent company of both Facebook (FB) and Instagram, did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Meta has also come under scrutiny for the impact its services have on younger users, particularly teen girls, in the wake of leaks last year from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

While teen usage of Facebook may have waned, this age group only seems to be more online.

In total, 97% of those surveyed said they use the internet daily, up from 92% of teens who said they used the internet daily in the 2015 report.

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Nearly half of all teens say they use the internet 'almost constantly,' survey finds | CNN Business

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Nearly half of US teens say they use the internet "almost constantly," according to a new survey released on Wednesday. The survey of 1,316 teenagers delved into the technology habits of teens and was conducted by the Pew Research Center.

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What Teenagers Want Adults to Understand About Their Lives Online

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Young people told us they see the internet as a “world of endless possibilities.” But, they admitted, it’s not without its downsides.

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By Common Sense Media | June 4, 2020

Let's be clear: "Fake news" has always existed. From P.T. Barnum to Ripley's Believe It or Not to supermarket tabloids, selling outrageous ideas has long been a part of our culture. Most kids can tell the difference between the shocking stories they see in the checkout line and the more evenhanded reporting they see on the local TV news.

But today's fake online news sources so closely mimic real news that it's challenging even for adults to discern what's real and what's fake. Also, kids have less experience in and context for evaluating news sources, so certain words or images that might immediately tell an adult that something is fake or biased might not have the same effect on kids. Indeed, the spread of "fake news" has made tweens and teens very skeptical of the information they see and hear.

According to Common Sense Media's report, News and America's Kids: How Young People Perceive and Are Impacted by the News, less than half of kids agree that they know how to tell fake news stories from real ones. When it comes to online news, the stats reveal a serious lack of faith:

Only about one in four kids who gets news online think that news posted online (either by people they're close with or by news organizations) is "very accurate."

Only seven percent think news by people they don't know well is "very accurate."

Tweens are more likely than teens to think that news posted online is "very accurate."

The good news is that kids who get news from social media sites are trying to be careful readers. Most kids who get their news from social media say they pay "a lot" or "some" attention to the source the link on social media takes them to. And the majority who get news online say that when they come across information in a news story that they think is wrong, they "sometimes" or "often" try to figure out whether or not it's true.

In general, the following are the key identifiers of legitimate and fake news.

Hallmarks of legitimate news:

Attribution. Credible news stories include an author's byline, a dateline (when and where the story originated), and facts, figures, and quotes attributed to specific people and groups.

Standards and ethics. Credible news adheres to certain standards of ethics and professional behavior that are published on its website. You can read the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics to get a sense of the rules reporters must follow.

Full disclosure. An author should be clear about when his or her work is an opinion and whether he or she has any existing relationship with the subject matter that might color their judgment. Opinion pieces should be labeled "op-ed" or "opinion," and they're written in the first person (using "I").

Objective sources. Experts and other sources should have no conflict of interest when commenting on a story.

Trustworthy research. Studies created by scientists from reputable labs, such as ones affiliated with universities or independent, nonprofit institutions (that have no financial incentive to provide the data they're publishing) should describe their methodology. Research should be "peer-reviewed" (other scientists have read and signed off on the methods used to collect data).

Hallmarks of fake news:

Advertorial. Content that mimics traditional news but is paid for by an advertiser must state that it's advertising. It says "paid for by" or "sponsored content."

Viral videos. Not all viral videos are fake. But some that show up on the internet and on social media feeds can be misleading. Videos can be edited to include only specific scenes and audio.

Unusual URLs. The most familiar URLs end with ".com," ".net," ".gov," ".org," ".mil," and ".edu." Anything added to the ends of those URLs -- for example, ".co" -- could indicate someone trying to disguise their identity. Especially suspect are URLs that look eerily similar to the legitimate sites you already know.

Low quality. Look for words in all caps, headlines with glaring grammatical errors, bold claims with no sources, and sensationalist images (women in bikinis are popular in fake news). These are clues that you should be skeptical of the source.

Clickbait. Headlines with words such as "unbelievable," "epic," and "amazing" and extreme images designed to get people to click on a story usually lead to dubious content (ads, contests, downloads, surveys, sketchy business opportunities, and content that doesn't match the headline).

Unflattering photos. Websites and magazines with a particular bias or extreme view run photos of those they oppose caught mid-sneeze, frowning, and blinking. Legitimate news sources strive to use images that illustrate the main idea of a story.

Guilt by association. Fraudulent news sources place seemingly unrelated photos side by side to make the subjects seem to be behaving inappropriately. (Legitimate news sources try to avoid this.)

Unclear creator. Author bios should list why the creator is qualified to report on a topic. The site itself should clearly explain who supports the site or who is associated with it. If this information doesn't exist -- and if the site requires that you register before you can learn anything about its backers -- you have to wonder why they aren't being transparent.

Annoying, intrusive ads. Banner ads, flashing ads, and pop-ups are signs that the site is just trying to get clicks.

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Do tweens and teens believe "fake news"?

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By Common Sense Media | June 4, 2020 Let's be clear: "Fake news" has always existed. From P.T. Barnum to Ripley's Believe It or Not to supermarket tabloids, selling outrageous ideas has long been a part of our culture.

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Editor's Note: The negative effects of so-called fake news were felt in the 2016 presidential election and a subsequent dangerous situation at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, highlighting the need for news and media literacy. A recent by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that young people are particularly susceptible to fake news: the majority could not tell the difference between fake news and real news. Part of the solution will involve providing students with the media literacy skills they need to evaluate sources, according to the lead author of the study Sam Wineburg. NewsHour Extra's teacher resource website also provides this study lesson plan .
Did Donald Trump support the Iraq War? Hillary Clinton said yes. He said no. Who was right?

In search of answers, many of us ask our kids to "Google" something. These so-called digital natives, who have never known a world without screens, are the household's resident fact-checkers. If anyone can find the truth, we assume, they can.

Don't be so sure.

True, many of our kids can flit between Facebook and Twitter while uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to using the Internet to get to the bottom of things, teens are no better than the rest of us. Often they are worse.

In a study conducted by Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues at Northwestern University, 102 college students went online to answer questions about things that matter to them-like how to advise a female friend who's desperate to prevent pregnancy after her boyfriend's condom broke. How did students decide what to believe? One factor loomed largest: a site's placement in the search results. Students ignored the sponsoring organization and the article's author, blindly trusting the search engine to put the most reliable results first.

Research we've conducted at Stanford University supports these findings. Over the past 18 months, we administered assessments that tap young people's ability to judge online information. We analyzed over 7,804 responses from students in middle school through college. At every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation: middle school students unable to tell the difference between an advertisement and a news story; high school students taking at face value a cooked-up chart from the Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee; college students credulously accepting a .org top-level domain name as if it were a Good Housekeeping seal.

When it comes to using the Internet to get to the bottom of things, Junior's no better than the rest of us. Often he's worse.

One task asked students to determine the trustworthiness of material on the websites of two organizations: the 66,000 member American Academy of Pediatrics, established in 1930 and publisher of the journal Pediatrics, vs. the American College of Pediatricians, a fringe group that broke with the main organization in 2002 over its stance on adoption by same-sex couples. We asked 25 undergraduates at Stanford-the most selective college in the country, which rejected 95 percent of its applicants last year-to spend up to 10 minutes examining content on both sites. Students could stay on the initial web page, click on links, Google something else-anything they would normally do to reach a judgment.

More than half concluded that the article from the American College of Pediatricians, an organization that ties homosexuality to pedophilia and which the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled a hate group, was "more reliable." Even students who preferred the entry from the American Academy of Pediatrics never uncovered the differences between the two groups. Instead, they saw the two organizations as equivalent and focused their evaluations on surface features of the websites. As one student put it: "They seemed equally reliable to me. ... They are both from academies or institutions that deal with this stuff every day."

Ironically, many students learned so little because they spent most of their time reading the articles on each organization's site. But masking true intentions and ownership on the web has grown so sophisticated that to rely on the same set of skills one uses for print reading is naive. Parsing digital information before one knows if a site can be trusted is a colossal waste of time and energy.

This became clear to us when we gave our tasks to professional fact-checkers. Three strategies separate checkers from the rest of us:

* Landing on an unfamiliar site, the first thing checkers did was to leave it. If undergraduates read vertically, evaluating online articles as if they were printed news stories, fact-checkers read laterally, jumping off the original page, opening up a new tab, Googling the name of the organization or its president. Dropped in the middle of a forest, hikers know they can't divine their way out by looking at the ground. They use a compass. Similarly, fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to determine where information is coming from before they read it.

* Second, fact-checkers know it's not about "About." They don't evaluate a site based solely on the description it provides about itself. If a site can masquerade as a nonpartisan think tank when funded by corporate interests and created by a Washington public relations firm, it can surely pull the wool over our eyes with a concocted "About" page.

* Third, fact-checkers look past the order of search results. Instead of trusting Google to sort pages by reliability (which reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how Google works), the checkers mined URLs and abstracts for clues. They regularly scrolled down to the bottom of the search results page in their quest to make an informed decision about where to click first.

None of this is rocket science. But it's often not taught in school. In fact, some schools have special filters that direct students to already vetted sites, effectively creating a generation of bubble children who never develop the immunities needed to ward off the toxins that float across their Facebook feeds, where students most often get their news. This approach protects young people from the real world rather than preparing them to deal with it.

After the vice presidential debate, Hillary Clinton's campaign tweeted, "Unfortunately for Mike Pence and Donald Trump, Google exists (and we aren't stupid)." Yes, Google puts vast quantities of information at our fingertips. But it also puts the onus for fact-checking on us. For every political question swirling in this election, there are countless websites vying for our attention-front groups and fake news sites right next to legitimate and reliable sources.

We agree with the tweet from the Clinton campaign. We're not stupid. But when we turn to our screens for information and answers, we need to get a lot smarter about how we decide what's true and what's not.

The PBS NewsHour'sTeachers' Lounge blog, written by teachers or school-related staff, gives the public a glimpse into how current issues affect life inside schools.
This story was produced by Education Week, a nonprofit, independent news organization with comprehensive pre-K-12 news and analysis. Read the original post here.

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Column: Most teens can't tell fake from real news

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Editor's Note: The negative effects of so-called fake news were felt in the 2016 presidential election and a subsequent dangerous situation at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, highlighting the need for news and media literacy. A recent by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that young people are particularly susceptible to fake news: the majority could not tell the difference between fake news and real news.