Combating Fake News - Agenda for Research and Action

Sep 16, 2026

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Recent shifts in the media ecosystem increase concern about democratic societies’ vulnerability to fake news and about the public’s limited ability to correct misinformation. The fast pace of today’s information environment, especially across social media, helps misinformation spread and makes it difficult to reverse beliefs shaped by heuristics and social cues. With a small but constantly changing set of misinformation sources, research needs both real-time detection capabilities and socio-technical interventions.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryGeneral

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time7 min

AccessFree to download

Executive Summary

Section 1 | The State of Misinformation

The Psychology of Fake News

How Fake News Spreads

Section 3 | Action: Stemming Fake news

Making the Discussion Bipartisan

Making the Truth “Louder”

Building a Shared Infrastructure for Social Media Research

Section 4 | Research Directions: What We Need to Find Out

Conclusion

References

Appendix: Conference Schedule

Combating Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action May 2017 Conference held February 17–18, 2017 Organized by Matthew Baum (Harvard), David Lazer (Northeastern), and Nicco Mele (Harvard) Sponsored by Final report written by David Lazer †‡, Matthew Baum ‡, Nir Grinberg †‡, Lisa Friedland †‡, Kenneth Joseph†‡, Will Hobbs †‡, and Carolina Mattsson † Drawn from presentations by Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Adam Berinsky (MIT), Helen Boaden (BBC), Katherine Brown (Council on Foreign Relations), Kelly Greenhill (Tufts and Harvard), David Lazer (Northeastern), Filippo Menczer (Indiana), Miriam Metzger (UC Santa Barbara), Brendan Nyhan (Dartmouth), Eli Pariser (UpWorthy), Gordon Pennycook (Yale), Lori Robertson ([FactCheck.org](FactCheck.org)), David Rothschild (Microsoft Research), Michael Schudson (Columbia), Adam Sharp (formerly Twitter), Steven Sloman (Brown), Cass Sunstein (Harvard), Emily Thorson (Boston College), and Duncan Watts (Microsoft Research) . † Northeastern University ‡ Harvard University Table of Contents 1. Executive Summary 3 2. Section 1 | The State of Misinformation 4 3. Section 2 | Foundations of Fake News 6 The Psychology of Fake News 6 How Fake News Spreads 7 4. Section 3 | Action: Stemming Fake news 9 Making the Discussion Bipartisan 9 Making the Truth “Louder” 9 Building a Shared Infrastructure for Social Media Research 11 5. Section 4 | Research Directions: What We Need to Find Out 12 6. Conclusion 13 7. References 14 8. Appendix: Conference Schedule 17 Executive Summary Recent shifts in the media ecosystem raise new concerns about the vulnerability of democratic societies to fake news and the public’s limited ability to contain it. Fake news as a form of misinformation benefits from the fast pace that information travels in today’s media ecosystem, in particular across social media platforms. An abundance of information sources online leads individuals to rely heavily on heuristics and social cues in order to determine the credibility of information and to shape their beliefs, which are in turn extremely difficult to correct or change. The relatively small, but constantly changing, number of sources that produce misinformation on social media offers both a challenge for real-time detection algorithms and a promise for more targeted socio-technical interventions. There are some possible pathways for reducing fake news, including: (1) offering feedback to users that particular news may be fake (which seems to depress overall sharing from those individuals); (2) providing ideologically compatible sources that confirm that particular news is fake; (3) detecting information that is being promoted by bots and “cyborg” accounts and tuning algorithms to not respond to those manipulations; and (4) because a few sources may be the origin of most fake news, identifying those sources and reducing promotion (by the platforms) of information from those sources. As a research community, we identified three courses of action that can be taken in the immediate future: involving more conservatives in the discussion of misinformation in politics, collaborating more closely with journalists in order to make the truth “louder,” and developing multidisciplinary community-wide shared resources for conducting academic research on the presence and dissemination of misinformation on social media platforms. Moving forward, we must expand the study of social and cognitive interventions that minimize the effects of misinformation on individuals and communities, as well as of how socio-technical systems such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter currently facilitate the spread of misinformation and what internal policies might reduce those effects. More broadly, we must investigate what the necessary ingredients are for information systems that encourage a culture of truth. This report is organized as follows. Section 1 describes the state of misinformation in the curre

FAQs

Why is fake news difficult to contain in today’s media environment?

Fake news spreads quickly through social media, and people rely on heuristics and social cues to judge credibility. These belief changes are extremely hard to correct once formed.

What near-term research and action steps does the report recommend?

The report highlights involving more conservatives in misinformation discussions, collaborating with journalists to make the truth more visible, and building multidisciplinary shared resources for academic research on misinformation presence and dissemination.

What research gaps are emphasized for future work?

Future study should expand on social and cognitive interventions that reduce misinformation effects and on how socio-technical platforms (e.g., search and social networks) enable spread. It also calls for identifying ingredients for information systems that promote a culture of truth.

Sep 16, 2026

Upload by Aran