The earth is flat. Two plus two equals five. Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. These statements are untrue, yet there are people who still believe them and countless other examples of mis- and disinformation that dominate our news cycles and, worse, underlie many of our laws and policies. Fake news has so saturated public discourse that it is no longer possible to dismiss such statements as the stuff of conspiracy theorists alone. Conditioned by the proliferation of fake news, we are all increasingly liable to confuse what is true with what is not.
The difficulty of differentiating between real news and fake news, however, is not recent. Fake news has been around for as long as people have been communicating with each other, leading many to draw false conclusions about the world. In the “Of Note” contributions in this issue, Audrey Jaffe and Mark Osteen comment on two...
