Mini zebras. Single-horned goats. Unicorns. Bat-winged humanoids and bipedal beavers, all on the moon. If you opened The Sun newspaper in 1835, these magical creatures likely would’ve captivated your attention. The New York newspaper fabricated these stories, known as the “Great Moon Hoax,” spreading rumors about life on the moon and illustrating how easily false information can masquerade as truth. Later that year, the author revealed that the articles had been made up, but the event revealed just how easily the media can deceive its readers.¹ 

Fake news refers to deliberately fabricated or misleading information presented as legitimate news, often designed to manipulate public opinion, generate clicks, or achieve political or financial gain. It mimics the format and style of real journalism but lacks factual accuracy and journalistic integrity. Nearly two centuries after The Sun’s charade, fake news has evolved far beyond whimsical tales of lunar life, now posing serious threats to democracy, public health, and social cohesion. As misinformation spreads with unprecedented speed and sophistication, understanding its roots, psychological pull, and real-world impacts has never been more urgent.

Misinformation: False or inaccurate information that is spread, regardless of intent to deceive. It can arise from misunderstanding, misreporting, or accidental errors, and often contributes to public confusion or false beliefs.

Continued Influence Effect: A cognitive phenomenon describing the persistence of misinformation in memory and reasoning, even after a correction is provided. Once misinformation is learned, it can continue to exert an influence on a person's judgments and decisions, even if they know the original information was false.²  

Echo Chamber: A social or media environment where individuals are primarily exposed to information and opinions that reinforce their existing beliefs. This isolation from diverse viewpoints amplifies polarization and can entrench misinformation.³

Firehose of Falsehood: A propaganda technique that involves overwhelming audiences with a high volume of rapid, repetitive, and often contradictory messages. This tactic exploits cognitive overload, making it difficult for people to discern truth from falsehood.⁴

Infodemic: An overabundance of information, some correct and some incorrect, which includes deliberate attempts to disseminate wrong information to undermine public health and safety to advance alternative agendas. Whether online or offline, infodemics perpetuate fake news, threatening public safety and making it harder for individuals to distinguish between fact and fiction.⁵ 

Confirmation Bias: A cognitive bias in which people seek out, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm their pre-existing beliefs. It makes individuals more likely to accept misinformation that aligns with their views while dismissing contradictory evidence.

Popularized by Buzzfeed media editor Craig Silverman in 2014 and even given the title “word of the year” in 2017, the term “fake news” seems to be in its heyday. The phenomenon itself, however, is not new.⁶ Although fake news might seem like a product of the digital era, it has deep historical roots. With time to reflect, this may be unsurprising, as the capacity for humans to both believe and spread false information seems as innate as our capacity for communication itself. For example, in ancient Rome, wars often broke out between leaders, who relied on all sorts of sly tactics to gain control of public sentiment. Around 2000 years ago, during the Roman Republic’s civil war between Mark Antony and Octavian, the son of Julius Caesar, a power-hungry Octavian began spreading fake news about his opponent, claiming that Antony was not only a drunkard, but that his affair with the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, showed his inclination towards Eastern ways of living, which many ancient Romans opposed.⁶ 

Throughout the 16th century, a fake news war spread through sensationalist pamphlets during periods of religious and political upheaval in Europe. During the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics circulated lurid falsehoods about each other to sway public opinion. In the 18th century, Russian minister Grigory Potemkin allegedly constructed elaborate "Potemkin villages" to deceive Empress Catherine the Great about the prosperity of newly conquered lands.⁶ Whether this account was entirely true or exaggerated, the term "Potemkin village" entered history as an early symbol of state-sponsored deception. Even in these early years, fake news was being used as a tool for manipulating public perception and consolidating power.⁶

In the 20th century, a more systematic and state-controlled form of disinformation took shape, particularly during the Cold War. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, formalized the use of "dezinformatsiya," a tactic involving the deliberate spread of false or misleading information to sow confusion among enemies. Disinformation was central to the KGB's "active measures," which included creating forged documents, spreading conspiracy theories, and seeding false narratives into Western media.⁷ More recent exposés on these strategies have revealed that Soviet disinformation campaigns purposely sought to undermine trust in democratic institutions and foment internal dissent, which reflects the goals of many fake news efforts of today.⁷

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has adapted many of these Cold War tactics for the Internet era, using troll farms and bot networks to amplify fake news during major geopolitical events. Perhaps one of the most notable examples of this was during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when the Russian government channeled these same strategies, attempting to polarize public and political discourse in the U.S. and undermine the integrity of the electoral process.⁸ Russian operatives relied largely on a firehose of falsehood approach, which aims to overwhelm audiences with a flood of contradictory and misleading information. Behavioral science explains why this tactic is so effective: when overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and the intensity of emotional triggers, our brain defaults to heuristic processing, which in turn makes us more susceptible to falling for repeated falsehoods.⁸

The Russian government’s purposeful spread of misinformation is just one example of the ways in which this sinister phenomenon has played out on a global scale, particularly in recent years. The concerns about fake news now intersect with broader debates about surveillance and media manipulation; former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about mass surveillance showed how governments could collect and weaponize information in ways that were largely hidden from public scrutiny. When Snowden exposed the hidden architecture of surveillance, he also highlighted how information (regardless of whether it’s true or false) can be used to control public perception. The information he leaked not only reinforced existing public cynicism about surveillance, traditional news sources, and government communication but also planted the seeds for a near-constant concern about fake news.⁹ When people struggle to trust the truth because they can no longer discern what’s fake news and what’s authentic, chaos can spiral devastatingly fast. 

In the digital age, fake news has evolved from a state-run tactic into a decentralized, chaotic phenomenon, where anyone with access to the internet has the power to spread misinformation. The democratization of content creation via social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok has allowed fake news to spread at warp speed, devolving faster than we can regulate it. With the increasing power of AI, deepfakes and AI-generated content make it even harder to tell what’s real—and easier to create content that’s not. Fake news is no longer a mere nuisance but a structural force capable of reshaping societies. From early religious and Roman propaganda to Cold War disinformation and modern algorithm-driven misinformation, fake news has continually adapted to exploit our cognitive, emotional, social, and technological vulnerabilities. With those in power increasingly leveraging disinformation for their own benefit, it will be up to the rest of the world to determine how we can best combat it. 

Vladimir Putin

The President of Russia, who has served alternately as both president and prime minister since his election in 1999, and has been a central figure in deploying modern disinformation campaigns. Under his leadership, Russia has used sophisticated tactics, including state-sponsored troll farms and bot networks, to spread fake news globally, particularly aimed at sowing division and mistrust in Western democracies, most infamously during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.⁸

Edward Snowden

A former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who, in 2013, leaked classified information exposing global surveillance programs operated by the U.S. government. His revelations fueled widespread public skepticism toward government transparency and mainstream media, creating an environment in which fake news could more easily flourish by tapping into heightened distrust of official narratives.⁹

Joseph Stalin

The leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, who institutionalized the use of disinformation as a tool of state power. He pioneered the concept of “dezinformatsiya” using fake news, forged documents, and propaganda to manipulate public opinion both domestically and internationally, setting the groundwork for many modern state-sponsored misinformation strategies.⁷

Craig Silverman

The former Buzzfeed media editor who popularized the term “fake news” in 2014. Although the phrase existed pre-Silverman, he began using it while running a research project at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism on unverified claims and rumors spreading online, and later used the term in Buzzfeed articles, leading to widespread colloquial adoption.¹⁰ 

Donald Trump

The President of the United States, elected in both 2016 and 2024, who is known for often using the term “fake news” to discredit unfavorable media coverage. His frequent accusations that mainstream media outlets produce fake news, particularly after his electoral loss in 2020, have contributed to growing public distrust in journalism and have helped reshape political communication by blurring the lines between legitimate critique and outright dismissal of factual reporting.¹¹

In an era where misinformation spreads faster than ever, fake news not only deepens political divides but also distorts long-term memory and trust in institutions. Understanding how exposure to falsehoods reshapes beliefs—even after corrections—reveals the complex psychological and political consequences of our increasingly polarized information landscape.

Cognitive Bias and Misinformation Spread

Our brains, particularly when exhausted by the aforementioned firehose of falsehood, are likely to leverage heuristics, which can alleviate mental load, but also leave us more vulnerable to fake news. Confirmation bias is perhaps the most obvious heuristic to influence our propensity to succumb to fake news. This describes our underlying tendency to notice, focus on, and give greater credence to evidence that fits with our existing beliefs, which targeted fake news often does. In the world of social media algorithms, fake news is often targeted towards those who are more susceptible to believing the given narrative, and users are fed content that is skewed towards their established beliefs. This creates a digital echo chamber, in which people only encounter beliefs and opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas aren’t considered.³

Confirmation bias isn’t the only cognitive bias at play. In a study focused specifically on understanding which biases impact the reception of fake news, researchers found 39 distinct biases that manifest during the fact-checking process.⁴ For example, these include the anchoring effect, where we rely too much on the first information acquired when making a decision, and the authority bias, which describes our tendency to be more influenced by the opinions of authority figures, even if it means accepting information without critically evaluating the content, simply because it comes from a perceived authority.⁴ It’s easy to imagine how fake news presented early and often by powerful figures can elicit these biases, along with others like the bandwagon effect, the barnum effect, the Dunning-Kruger effect, or the fundamental attribution error. 

Polarization, Social Fragmentation, and Erosion of Trust

In an already polarized landscape, the power of fake news to deepen political and social divides is especially disconcerting. The prevalence of misinformation has been shown to undermine our trust in traditional media, science, and government institutions. In fact, in the United States, only 54% of Democrats, 27% of independents, and 12% of Republicans say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media.¹² Meanwhile, political figures like President Trump, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and even the Burmese military, routinely use the term “fake news” to dismiss allegations of injustices in their administration.¹³

One study conducted during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections found that fake news exposure was not only associated with a decline in trust of mainstream media among respondents, but also often associated with an overall increase in political trust, particularly trust in Congress and the justice system.¹⁴ An association between exposure to misinformation and an increased trust in the political party in power is concerning on its own, but additional investigation made this finding even more intriguing: although fake news consumption was generally linked to increased trust in political institutions, this was only true for moderates and conservatives. For liberals, exposure to fake news actually decreased political trust.¹⁴ The authors suspected that liberals are more biased against this type of content, and therefore less likely to believe the fake news in the first place. 

Long-Term Memory Distortion and Belief Persistence

When we are exposed to fake news, our experience of reading or watching the stories can create "false memories," and even when corrections are made, they often fail to dislodge the misinformation from our brains, which can be highly resistant to change. The power of internalized misinformation to endure even after correction is known as the "continued influence effect.” This cognitive phenomenon means that even when people understand that something they learned was false, they may still hold on to the original misinformation and make inferences based on it.² 

But why does this inaccurate information stick around, even after we know it’s false? Many researchers attribute it to our brains’ difficulties in updating memory to reflect the corrected information. Some of this is due to proactive interference, where old information interferes with our ability to recall newly learned information. People may struggle to replace the original misinformation with the new, corrected information, leading to the persistence of the fake news. This problem is also linked to a failure to suppress the initial misinformation, even when the correct information is known. People might still rely on the false news, even when they know it's wrong, because it may be more readily accessible or salient in their memory. 

For example, imagine someone hears a rumor or sees an Instagram post saying that a particular restaurant is serving poisoned food. Even after you’ve learned that the rumor or post was false, you might still avoid the restaurant for good measure—this is the continued influence effect in action! Now imagine if a rival restaurant had secretly planted this lie, knowing that even once the news was debunked, people would still be more likely to opt out. This kind of power has real repercussions, from interpersonal drama to large-scale political slander or even health misinformation. 

Experimental research, which also sometimes refers to this phenomenon as “belief echoes,” has suggested there are two main types of these echoes: one which is affective, involving the negative beliefs persisting on a subconscious level, an another which is cognitive, where the individual consciously reasons that even though they’re aware the news is fake, the existence of the information means that similar negative things are more likely to be true. In the context of political candidates, cognitive belief echoes are more likely when the fake news reinforces someone’s pre-existing political views.² 

Research has highlighted several factors that shape the continued influence effect, the first of which is the credibility of the source of the information and the source of the retraction. Unsurprisingly, retractions that come from trusted sources are more likely to be believed and reduce the long-term impact of the fake news. The strength of people's cognitive abilities, like working memory and inhibition, can also play a role in their susceptibility to long-term influence, as well as their emotional state when they first encounter the fake news and when the information is retracted.² 

One hopeful bit of research has demonstrated that, while the existence of belief echoes and the continued influence effect can motivate political candidates to spread fake news about their opponents, politicians also suffer consequences for making false claims, a fact which can hopefully disincentivize spreading misinformation.² Ideally, understanding the continued influence effect can help us design more effective communication strategies to combat fake news—and spread genuine information in the meantime. 

In today’s information landscape, deciding what qualifies as “fake news” is far from straightforward and is deeply entangled with questions of power, politics, and ideology. As authorities attempt to regulate misinformation, they face the dual challenge of navigating inherent biases while balancing free speech with public safety across diverse legal and cultural contexts.

AI and Deepfakes in Misinformation Warfare 

To reiterate, fake news is by no means a novel phenomenon. Even before the internet, it was possible to doctor photos or take sound and images out of context, using them to perpetuate misinformation. The new danger introduced by artificial intelligence is that the speed and ease of generating fake news have been amplified exponentially. Whereas fake news previously required some level of effort and direction from a distinct creator, artificial intelligence now allows for a certain level of passivity in fake news content creation, leaving human regulators struggling to keep up.¹⁵ 

As the saying goes, seeing is believing, and while it might not be too difficult to disregard a news headline as fake, it can be much harder to shake something you’ve seen with your own eyes. Increasingly adept general adversarial networks can create hyper-realistic photos, videos, and audio, and the human brain struggles to keep up with distinguishing real from fake. For example, in a study where participants were asked to judge artificial faces made by GANs versus real faces, they judged the artificial face masks as being more realistic than human faces in a third of all trials.¹⁵ Participants almost always overclassify the fake faces as real, and this trend is likely to continue as AI improves, making it even harder to discern fake news from reality.¹⁵ 

Although it may seem that the proliferation of artificial intelligence is setting us on a path of certain destruction, there is still hope. Recent neuroscience research that focused on observers’ neural activity when presented with GAN-generated faces and real faces found that although the observers struggled to distinguish between the real and simply realistic faces, their brains showed distinct representations in their visual systems between the two conditions. Essentially, their brains initially recognized the differences between fake and real images, even though the participants weren’t able to consciously access this information to accurately say whether or not they thought the face was real.¹⁶ This is likely because semantic areas of the brain were engaged, which would override the signals from the visual neural centers, causing a dissociation between the ability of participants to categorize faces as real or fake and the decodability of this distinction in the brain.¹⁵

Another research team creatively (and perhaps ironically) employed generative AI to create a corpus of fake news content and then fed this same collection of fake news back to LLMs to bolster their training in detecting fake news.¹⁶ It’s possible that the power of these AI models may be enough not only to bring us down, but also to help bring us back out from the depths of misinformation black holes. 

Free Speech, Regulation, and Neurological Responses 

Who gets to decide what’s labeled as fake news? Any definition of fake news you may come across is likely not neutral, and probably reflects underlying sociopolitical struggles for power. Governments and media outlets wield significant authority in classifying content, but they are far from exempt from the influence of bias, and thus may label things not based on one coherent definition, but with varied definitions based on their own interpretations. Unfortunately, coming to a consensus on a definition of fake news, or a consistent rulebook for how to regulate it, is nearly impossible for many reasons. Again, every organization has its own unshakable biases and its own crowd of skeptics and critics. As fake news content and the ways it can spread change increasingly quickly, this only adds a layer to the challenge of regulation. 

How does one distinguish between fake news that could be classified as hate speech or dangerous rhetoric versus content that’s merely stating an otherwise ostracized opinion? How do we protect free speech while also protecting citizens’ safety? Many organizations even struggle to disseminate their digital content across international lines, as each country has varied legislation regarding fake news (with some invoking outright censorship).¹⁷ 

Critics argue that labeling certain stories or viewpoints as “fake” often mirrors the existing power dynamics of privileging dominant ideologies while silencing dissenting voices. This narrative is often reflected in alt-right and conspiracy groups who feel their content is disproportionately removed from social media or silenced in a broader cultural sense, which reinforces their beliefs that there is a conspiracy against them and their ideas.¹⁷ This visceral reaction is true even on fan sites discussing video games and movies.¹⁸ 

Peeling back the layers of the neuroscience behind perceived injustice and moral outrage offers insight into why accusations of censorship trigger such intense reactions. When people feel their voices are silenced or their views dismissed as fake news, the brain’s anterior insula and amygdala—regions linked to emotional arousal and moral judgment—become highly activated. This neurological response fosters feelings of betrayal and moral indignation, strengthening group identity and polarization.¹⁹ 

Research shows that perceived injustice can even amplify memory retention of the censored material. Think of this as a forbidden fruit effect, where the more a contested idea is off-limits, the higher its allure and persistence in our brains.²⁰

Power Dynamics and Astroturfing

Behavioral science reveals that political entities exploit these dynamics with precision. Using psychological profiling, campaigns can identify demographic segments most susceptible to certain narratives and deploy targeted misinformation designed to exploit cognitive biases like confirmation bias and the illusory truth effect. For example, during elections, fabricated stories tailored to specific fears or hopes—whether about immigration, public health, or economic security—are disseminated via microtargeting.²¹ 

This manipulation taps into both our System 1 (fast, emotional) and System 2 (slower, rational) thinking, making voters more likely to accept false claims if they align with their pre-existing beliefs or emotional states.²²

A further layer of complexity is introduced by the phenomenon of "astroturfing," a term in sociology referring to fake grassroots movements. You may have also heard the term “greenwashing,” which usually refers to companies making their product or policy seem more environmentally friendly than it actually is. Unlike genuine grassroots activism, astroturf campaigns are orchestrated by larger (and often financially invested) corporations, political operatives, or foreign actors, yet are designed to appear as spontaneous public outcries.²³ 

Disinformation plays a central role here, seeding fabricated stories or exaggerated claims that prey on unsuspecting and vulnerable individuals. Through social media amplification and coordinated bot activity, these campaigns manufacture echo chambers, which once again build a sense of widespread public sentiment, effectively skewing perceptions of consensus and legitimacy.³

Fox News Defamation Suit

$787,000,000. That was the ultimate size of the settlement between Dominion Voting Systems and the Fox News Network after Dominion sued the American network for defamation. In the wake of the 2020 election, hosts at the Fox News channel were endorsing lies from then-President Donald Trump about election fraud.¹¹ According to Dominion and outside reporters, the stars of the conservative channel used their platform to not only spread lies about the security of the voting machines but to falsely suggest that widespread election fraud had taken place. Executives at the network quickly came under scrutiny for giving airtime to figures like Rudy Giuliani, who were blatantly spreading fake news, claiming the election had been stolen without any credible evidence. Ultimately, the losing candidate, Donald Trump, ​​fueled this misinformation by tweeting, “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!,” without any evidence to back up his claims. 

Before the election took place, Trump had stated, "The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” sowing the seeds of doubt early on and creating the perfect conditions for fake news to spread in his favor; if he won, then he won fairly, but if he lost, then his supporters would be ready to believe that election fraud had taken place and prepared to jump on any suggestion that supported this, regardless of the validity.¹¹ These lies undermined trust in democracy, further polarized the public, and led to the infamous riots and attempted siege of the U.S. capitol on January 6th, 2021. 

COVID-19 Infodemic 

Every pandemic is unique, and one reason the COVID-19 pandemic stands out is that it was the first in history to be heavily influenced by social media and the internet. While the internet provides an easy way for public health alerts, advice, and resources to quickly reach a widespread audience, it also creates a breeding ground for fake news to proliferate. 

An international team of researchers examined 2,311 distinct reports on COVID-19 and found that an alarming 82% included false claims.⁵ They grouped this type of fake news into rumors, stigma, and conspiracy theories, all of which meet the definition of fake news. The false claims included things like “mobile phones can spread COVID-19,” and “wearing warm socks, mustard patches, and spreading goose fat on one’s chest as treatment,” and that drinking bleach may kill the virus.“⁵ Not only are these claims baseless, but they’re actively harmful. While encouraging people to drink bleach provides an obvious direct threat to safety, any kind of fake news, particularly when it describes faulty health advice, can have detrimental effects. 

When people are exposed to fake news about ways to avoid or treat an illness, they may feel a false sense of security and take unnecessary risks because they mistakenly think they’re protected. They may even reject additional news or advice, even if it’s real, if it contradicts the fake news they’ve been exposed to. And, like all fake news, the discovery that someone has been exposed to misinformation that they’d previously believed serves to further deepen mistrust in any legitimate sources, whether they be the government or news media.⁵ It then becomes one step harder to reach people in times of crisis, as even if they see the message, they may not believe it. 

The Human Error Behind Fake News with David Rand 

In this podcast episode, David Rand, professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, discusses his research on misinformation, trying to understand why people believe fake news, why it is spread in the first place, and what people can do about it.

Clickbait

Not all fake news is attention-grabbing, and not all attention-grabbing headlines are fake, but there is an important crossover between clickbait and fake news. This article explains how clickbait uses emotional, misleading headlines to grab attention and drive clicks, often sacrificing accuracy and trust for traffic, profit, and viral engagement.

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