The coercive logic of fake news

The spread of misinformation and “fake news” continues to be a major focus of public concern. A great deal of research has examined who falls for misinformation and why, and what can be done to make people more discerning consumers of news. Comparatively little work, however, has considered misinformation producers, and how their strategies interact with the psychology of news consumers. Here we use gametheoretic models to study the strategic interaction between news publishers and news readers. We show that publishers who seek to spread misinformation can generate high engagement with falsehoods by using strategies that mix true and false stories over time, in such a way that they serve more false stories to more loyal readers. These coercive strategies cause false stories to receive higher reader engagement than true stories – even when readers strictly prefer truth over falsehood. In contrast, publishers who seek to promote engagement with accurate information will use strategies that generate more engagement with true stories than with false stories. We confirm these predictions empirically by examining 1,000 headlines from 20 mainstream and 20 fake news sites, comparing Facebook engagement data with 20,000 perceived accuracy ratings collected in a survey experiment. We show that engagement is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy among misinformation sites, but positively correlated with perceived accuracy among mainstream sites. We then use our model to analyze the conditions under which news sites seeking engagement will produce false stories. We show that if a publisher incorrectly assumes that readers prefer falsehoods, their resulting publication strategy can itself manufacture greater engagement