Fake news is as old as human speech, but with the advent of social media the ability to spread misleading or outright false information has exploded with it. Social media can be both good and bad. It is good that it makes it nearly impossible for anyone or any group to monopolize news narratives now that people can obtain information from a multitude of different sources, but it is bad that it has multiplied the misinformation available to the public.
Misinformation proliferation is so severe that an estimated 62% of online content is deemed false, 43.7% of internet information is unreliable or false, and 52% of Americans encounter fake news on a regular basis. Worst of all, fake news has a 70% more likely chance of being “retweeted” than factual news does. The bottom line of these statistics is that everyone living today has an 86% global exposure to misinformation. Eighty-six percent global exposure means that nearly all of us have watched, listen to, or read misleading or false information being passed off as news.
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