New paper by me, @duncanjwatts, Jennifer Allen, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius "Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem" @ScienceAdvances https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/14/eaay3539 Three key points (1) Most Americans consume very little news ...

If you are reading this Twitter thread about research into news consumption you are not normal: median desktop monthly news consumption is 0 (2) Conditional on consuming news, television news still dominates & mainstream media is still big portion of online & social media.

Even 18-24 year-olds get 2x news from TV than online (3) Fake News, as regularly defined on the publication level by previous research, is tiny fraction of news consumption. Important for radicalization & formation of stories, but not for misinformation in the general population.

If you are concerned about misinformation you should look at mainstream media, especially television, or even non-news programming. That is where people get their information, and is thus were we should focus our attention.